> One obvious pattern to look into is a pure peer-to-peer model, where all presences are equally authoritative and the “true” state of reality is determined by

> One obvious pattern to look into is a pure peer-to-peer model, where all presences are equally authoritative and the “true” state of reality is determined by some kind of distributed consensus mechanism. Makes me wonder if you could model Mage: The Awakening as a distributed reality consensus MMO. Sybil attacks would be the primary weakness. Though, if it was a paid game you'd _somewhat_ mitigate that. The thoughts about clients being authoritative on different unums is very interesting. For larger worlds, it could lead to some interesting scalability results. If I'm exploring a region with no one else, the server can simply let the client decide whats happening and offload that work. For more dense situations, clients would need to communicate with each other. A server could detect cheaters via sampling, maybe? Of course, the problem might be that a cheater might only need to cheat a proportionally small amount of time. For sparse situations, you could just do the full computations later and punish harshly if cheating is detected. For dense situations, it becomes difficult to determine how you could roll back fairly. It's very interesting. I'd love to build something like this. I think it could have very compelling, novel gameplay mechanics. Not quite sure what the story would need to be to drive players into those mechanics though.