I agree Luby's codes came after Quake. Although other codes for the erasure channel did exist, and the important ideas for the class of scheme I'm talking about

I agree Luby's codes came after Quake. Although other codes for the erasure channel did exist, and the important ideas for the class of scheme I'm talking about were known. That wasn't meant to be my point though. I was just thinking about the puzzle, rather than what "should" have been done. I don't follow the final parenthetical comment: the point of the coding is precisely so that the server can recover all information regardless of packet loss so that it can keep going. If a client disappears then the server acts as if it disappeared at the last successfully decoded delta (it has to have a means to deal with clients disappearing regardless).