It certainly matters to adjudication. But perhaps the question players care about is not quite, "Did I block before that punch landed?" (a very important questi

It certainly matters to adjudication. But perhaps the question players care about is not quite, "Did I block before that punch landed?" (a very important question), but, "I just blocked, but he hit me for some reason anyway." That is to say, players get upset (1) if something seems to violate their own worldview, due to adjudication. Naively, we could solve that case by running the timesteps of the simulation slower than the greatest latency (or more accurately, when heartbeats from all players have been received for a given timestep). That would introduce us to another reason players get upset: (2) if the game is really laggy. I'm glad you bring up relativity as an example. The best method games have for improving the real-time illusion is locality.