This is an interesting idea but I do wonder if it can be applied to generic collaborative editing "as is". The approach for synchronized ticks (I think most RTS games do something similar to the Blizzard approach) does require each participant to "ack" the tick. You can see this when one participant is lagging in that the simulation freezes for all players until they acknowledge. The online gaming approach is to let other players vote to kick someone who is lagging the game but that probably wouldn't be considered suitable in something like enterprise content management.

Can some variation of the approach be taken without the strict requirement that: - There is a known set of participants at any time - The list of participants has a reasonable well-bounded size - Peers can communicate with each other directly (WebRTC is available but there are sharp corners) - It's acceptable to freeze all players based on one lagging player - Need an unambiguous way to handle simultaneous player actions against shared state

Most likely the "fix" for the friction is that you just slow the ticks down a lot compared to what you would do in a multi-player game.