[Blacklite]

I'd just like to add that you can also use UPDATE LOW_PRIORITY (****** it if you don't know what it is). Basically using a combination of threading and UPDATE LOW_PRIORITY, the effort of saving your player stats will be sent to MySQL, and UPDATE LOW_PRIORITY means the MySQL server will do the query in its own time.

I suggest for big tables that don't get new rows very often, that you also use InnoDB as it has row locking, although with InnoDB you can't use UPDATE LOW_PRIORITY.

EDIT: Just by the way, the reason I pounced on this thread is because Kar basically said he was doing it wrong, when there was nothing outstandingly wrong in the way that Kyle's query was done.