Comment by noduerme

The game state being a SQL table just kinda triggered a memory of a year of optimization for me. One thing I'm still unsure of being a good decision or a bad one, when I wrote my casino in 2010, was having every remote call update game states on SQL tables that were used as the source of truth. With multiple players you can imagine that there would sometimes be issues. Some of the deadlock problems early on were horrific; scaling was a nightmare. But everything was atomic. No risk of lost data beyond one turn not reaching the server or deadlocking, nothing like a huge nodejs process choking on everyone's calls at the same time, or losing its memory. You always had state.

Looking back it seems like not a terrible design pattern for multiplayer turn-based games, if you can work out the kinks. Atomicity guarantees at least that there is a consistent state that won't get lost. Doing that read/write loop for an action game? Pure folly, but it's pretty funny to me.