Does that mean it takes longer after loading before every character is initialized correctly?
No that's still the same. The function I talk about are the ones which for example determine how much health you lose if you are poisoned and how quick your gun reloads. The speed is still the same, but instead of checking every 1 ms how much your gun should be reloaded it now checks every 200ms or so. So you won't notice it, but it really improves FPS as @ANSEL noticed .