When a player joins I want it to be fully updated (so to say initialized) on ALL machines. That's mainly visual things like the model itself, its scale, the skin....
Of course I can code this and do an update for every single entity parameter - but it's so much easier to have this done automatically if desired.
So my workarund was to activate automatic updates (reseting NOSEND) for a short period after a client joined and once everysthing is initialized, switch over to manual updating.

The cyclical updates in my case are kept to a minimum. Mainly only keystroke information, movement stuff, entity status mode (used for animation and certain entity events). Things like animation (generally visual things) are done by each machine itself without transfering such information between server/client to keep traffic low. At least low enough for like 4 players via ISDN connection - since I'm not working on a MMOG no distance dependent update and other thigns are required.



Summarizing: This is not a blocking point, it's just a matter of easy use