dont worry about the algorithm for how it would be done in the server, thats the least of our problems. They would prolly be stored similar to the maps in some sort of spacial data structure with everything of fixed length/limit (specifically the number of connections).
There are several problems with building the grids in the first place:
1. There is no way to visualize them in the client, so no way to really see what your doing.
2. Auto-connecting is not trivial... theres a lot of things which will affect this... specifically hills, holes, hallways, etc. You pointed out a very good case above too... with your picture... C---A---B... unless those three points were perfectly colinear (not possible with player-collected data), the connector cannot automatically choose to not connect B and C withouth extensive spacial calculations.
3. The collected points would have to exist at about eye level on the player, and not on the floor, otherwise a small step or bump in the zone will cause two points to be disconnected.
4. I would say were looking at 400+ man hours to path out zones... and then theres no trivial way to debug them once they are made, and no way to tell the quality of what was made.
Honestly, to get around these problems, somebody would need to take the (now defunct IMO) freaku/openEQ stuff, finish a bunch of work on it, and then build in visualization code to draw the grids.
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