Have you ever played Eve Online? Within a solar system you can warp to any point. Most of the space is utterly empty and finding where some ship is requires probes and successive iterations of scanning and zeroing in on the ship. Giving the ship some safety time after which it can just warp to another random place in the solar system. In ground-based-walking-around games there simply isn't enough space for such a dynamic to occur. Eve took advantage of a lot of other aspects of space that can't work in a ground-based system like shooting-lag, ship moving lag, etc, to hide the impossible-to-eliminate Internet lag. Anyhow, your idea reminded me of this.