This feels like a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
The problem is that every game has a losing team, and the players are supposed to feel bad no matter how well they performed. “Defeat” or “Loss” messages, sad music, sinking stats, public match record showing off your failure; there’s punishment baked into this model of game.
Trying to keep players by throwing them easy wins is an insult. You’re the game developer that created this “winner/loser” model to begin with. Now you’re trying to make me feel better with this bullshit? You’re the one that caused the pain to begin with.
They mention a character Charlie, unicorns, and a candy place. I don’t know why they are being so careful to avoid accusations of stealing the author’s work, because that’s exactly what they’re doing. People who are familiar with Charlie the unicorn are supposed to recognize it here, and spend their money on Warner Bros merchandise. How could you possibly not see this as theft?
Why impossible? Server-authoritative programming is common in PVP gaming, even high-performance recent games. I don’t think anyone is suggesting lazily loading chunks of player data like wandering into a new chunk in Minecraft. Just write efficient, clean code that anonymizes or encrypts player data so it can’t be read client-side.
Your joke wasn’t clear, sorry.