Well , there ' s two ways a game can work . At each moment , it can you send you all the information about the game ' s state at that moment , or it can just send you the information about what ' s changed since the previous moments . The former has the advantage of allowing instant reconnects , but the disadvantage of consuming a significantly larger amount of bandwidth and processing power . Probably enough to make the game unplayable for people who don ' t have topend internet connections . I suppose a compromise would be to have it save a snapshot of the game ' s state every minute or so , so that people who are reconnecting would only have to catch up to the most recent minute . Would you be willing to suffer , say , a halfsecond input delay every minute on the minute while playing , for the sake of making reconnects easier ? I don ' t think I would . Alternatively , if someone was trying to reconnect it could get a snapshot on demand from the other players . So if one person was having connectivity issues , everyone would start experiencing pauses and delays . Also not ideal . So it ' s not a trivial problem to come up with a way to improve it .