It'd be nice to have more advanced string parsing functions and arrays in GameMaker, since it'd allow for coordinate compression. For example, you'd be able to send the following as coordinates:
$blahvar = split("playerName:xCoord:yCoord:state",":")
And split on the :, and then assign different things as $blahvar[0], $blahvar[1], $blahvar[2], $blahvar[3].
Hopefully something Al considers for 4.0.
Ghost