Disconnect Handling: Using a 30-Second Host Lease Before Reassigning a Room Host

The article argues that a player's disconnect should begin a 30-second host lease rather than immediately promoting another participant. During that window, the same player can rejoin with a fresh scoped token and reclaim the room. If the lease expires, a single compare-and-swap operation elects the next eligible participant, and clients are then synchronized from an ordered event log. The author stresses that WebRTC connection-state changes are noisy signals that cannot prove a user has abandoned a room, so a shared transactional store should own the lease, membership generation, and event sequence. Retries are handled through request IDs for idempotency, while generation numbers stop stale sockets from reclaiming newer room instances.