HOW MUCH DOES AN EVENT SLOW DOWN A GAME IF IT DOESN'T DO ANYTHING? RMVX ACE

I would say, typically, once the sprite/event is loaded in, since there is no further action (If there are, they do not trigger until an action button I would assume), they are not running any processes in the background. No animation, no movement, ect.

I would not worry unless they are all doing something at the same time.

Enjoy your scary large crowds.

Basically what Kory_Toombs said. If the event in question isn't doing anything, it's not draining much of anything. It's draining something, but that measurement is probably negligible. Still, get rid of it if you don't need it because streamlining your program is a habit you should really pick up. Your biggest memory drains are usually graphics and music; particularly animations. It's not the whole game. It's just what's on your screen. So yeah, generally keep your maps a reasonable size, and if you've got 50 animations going, you're probably murdering your framerate. Mind you, if you've got a hundred variables and switches going through an event (and that's not actually uncommon), then you're, very likely, going to notice something, though probably not something major. Giant world maps are okay because in the typical game, they usually don't have anything going on in them except transfers.

From my understanding, Ace has to run through every possible option on on every tab of an event to see if you're using it. So even if it's not doing anything Ace still has to check and find out.

I actually have noticeable lag in one of my games (Chips Challenge, where you move the blocks.) That is mostly caused by having over 200 events on one page. Many of those are parallel processes. So it's something I have experienced. Another way you can give yourself lag is in the program database, ie. not the game, but Ace itself. Load up one of the largest icon sets available into your game and you'll notice lag every time you open up your database.