When the Event Log Became a Liability: What Happened When We Treated Events Like Garbage

The Problem We Were Actually Solving The Treasure Hunt Engine is a multiplayer game where players dig for virtual gems, craft tools, and compete on leaderboards. Every action produces an event: dig_started, gem_found, score_updated, inventory_cleared. We needed a system that could ingest, deduplicate, and propagate these events to every player in under 200 ms while guaranteeing no double-counting of rare gems. Our first attempt used Kafka as a raw log, with a downstream Flink job for deduplicati