Oh the days of the Chesapeake shuffle, what many us used to call the lag spikes and rollbacks the afflicted the game early on. You could tell your servers cycle time with little effort and there were days when everything was just out of sync and even movement from certain areas was not a certain event.

This model apparently allowed for quite a few dupe bugs, one of which I published on an old fan site. It was quite involved, in fact I wrote it up so deliberately convoluted that what you were doing was obvious. Did it work, I wasn't quite sure but I did suffer both duplication of items and loss from their system through no effort on my part.

Its kind of funny to learn how they did it this late, reminds me of mechanisms we employed with some early multiplayer door games on BBSes. Supporting multiple players for some early titles was a bear, the least of which was the lack of stability of most connections just plain bad code that bit you in the butt more often than not.