Another example of this sort of behavior was the netcode common to Quake and many other shooters--since lots of history is sent as full state instead of deltas,

Another example of this sort of behavior was the netcode common to Quake and many other shooters--since lots of history is sent as full state instead of deltas, it's "okay" to have lost packets. It's not ideal, and it'll screw up certain types of things that really, really want a contiguous history of events, but for normal play it's perfectly fine. When doing client-side prediction, then it may become useful to have historical data, but as my sibling post suggests, a ring buffer of length one minimizes latency. It actually might be interesting to see a writeup on multiplayer games viewed through the lens of eventually-consistent distributed databases.