I Made the Wrong Bet on Event Streaming in Our Treasure Hunt Engine

The Problem We Were Actually Solving In hindsight, we were trying to solve a multi-faceted problem that went beyond just event handling. We needed to ensure that the game state was always up-to-date, even when players were offline or experienced network latency. We also needed to prevent cheating by detecting and penalizing players who tried to manipulate the game state. On top of that, we had to ensure that the system could scale to handle thousands of concurrent players and millions of events