I'm not sure if the view distance is supposed to work like this but I've set it at 2 but if a player moves 15-16 blocks away from another player, they lose visibility of the player. I just wanted to know if there was any way of increasing the range without increasing view distance. I've seen options in the Spigot.yml and Bukkit.yml about entity tracking and entity activation range but the player view distance doesn't seem to be affected by any value I input.
changing the player view distance definitely works, but I dont think you can go over the view distance you have set.
AFAIK the server won't send any data to a player if the data(a chunk, player, entity, ect) is over the view distance, you might be able to send it with protocol lib ect, but, eh.. Seems silly.
No, but I'm trying to find a sweet spot to reduce as much lag as I can and maintain over 400 concurrent users. I'll probably try 3 since it seems like the only real solution at the moment.
