Two-node bench with the fixed host:local labels shows each player's drop-zone
request is answered by the OTHER machine's DropZone: A asks, B grants; B asks, A
grants. FindGroup("DropZones") iterates replicants of remotely-mastered zones
too and takes the geometrically closest, so a respawn is
my request -> an arbitrary peer's DropZone -> that peer's reply -> back to me.
With 5 players that is 5 round trips through arbitrary peers, and ONE degraded
peer can strand everybody else's respawn. That finally explains the otherwise
unexplained field datum that one machine stopped processing the death-transition
stream 57% into a match and never recovered (0 explosions/wreck swaps/burials
while four other machines logged 4/4/4) -- a node in that state cannot answer
anyone's respawn. It also explains why solo is 100% reliable (in-process) and
why a healthy 2-node bench passes.
Also fixes the instrumentation before it costs a night: every [dz] line printed
"entity 1" because a player's LOCAL entity id is 1 on every machine -- with five
players the log would have said a respawn stalled but not WHOSE. All [dz] lines
now print host:local (including the usedBy= owner of each busy slot).
Doc: two candidate fixes recorded (prefer a locally-mastered DropZone / make the
reply path tolerant of a deathCount that is ahead of ours), neither to be guessed
at -- the [ghost] DISCARDED line's mismatch direction decides it in one line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
