In my experience the sync issues get much worse over VPN. The implementation seems to be extremely timing sensitive.
Oh and over the internet you don’t have the chance to quickly look over to your pals monitors to notice that their current court hearing scene looks different from yours (at which point you can alt+f4 and look for the last good savegame).
Or as a true Guild player describes it: “keeping save game backups and doing regular checks to figure out if the game state is still in sync”. “The Guild” was the reason I got a “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” T-Shirt for LAN parties.
And don’t get me wrong: I am saying the game is SO GOOD it was totally worth all that trouble. I wish so hard for someone to release/leak the source code some time so someone with enough pain tolerance can try to rework the network stack. Or maybe a remaster of that game. It has a so much better feeling than its successors.
Oooh, I would really like to see that challanged in front of a German court after such a deletion happened. There are so many different legal facettes here.
Is the deletion maybe necessary due to GDPR? (they have to keep the minimum amount of data)
What’s with the physical copies / codes that were bought. Should they automatically be freed up for re-use once the account that claimed them is deleted? (That would kinda make sense to me.)
What about stricly digitally bought games?
How far are their ToS valid in our jurisdiction?
Damn I really hope they do this to the wrong person and rub them the wrong way so they get dragged to court for this.