[nosuchthing]

Having played a multiplayer mobile game that uses a "everything syncs soon" protocol, and at the same time relies on the main mechanics of the game being timing the moves of characters against your opponents it often can lead to making the game highly unpredictable and jittery with "alternate timeline warps" when it resyncs, having nullified important moves.

[stcredzero]

Having played a multiplayer mobile game that uses a "everything syncs soon" protocol, and at the same time relies on the main mechanics of the game being timing the moves of characters against your opponents it often can lead to making the game highly unpredictable and jittery with "alternate timeline warps" when it resyncs, having nullified important moves.

Nope. Most designers pick a particular mechanic and try to make that exact mechanic work over the network. If you abandon the particular mechanic and aim on meta-goals, one of which might be no jitters, resyncs, and (visible) alternate timelines, then you can eliminate everything you just mentioned above.

[nosuchthing]

If you'd like to share I'd love to hear how you approach solving sync issues with multiplayer time sensitive games.

Starcraft/Warcraft RTS games seem to force every client in the same "room" to slow down if other clients report back bad/slow sync clocks, FPS games like CS/HL engine based will penalize single clients if they lag, and the worst I've seen was a mobile game by SNK which seems to rely on and give too much information to the client which has resulted in many users abusing such protocols.

[stcredzero]

I may do that in coming weeks if my current experiments work out.