> To accomplish this, the world state needed to be stored in a central database and served to Minecraft servers as they popped in and out of existence Could yo

> To accomplish this, the world state needed to be stored in a central database and served to Minecraft servers as they popped in and out of existence Could you elaborate on this point? To me "need" seems to strong; it could also be addressed via replication or a distributed model. Centralized is absolutely the most straight-forward (and may be the most suitable) but I'd love to see some reasoning as to why it's the only appropriate approach.