Transient periods is the point - for a client to enter a spiral of death, the simulation is running slowly enough that a client can't keep up, even if it's all they're doing. If a client enters this state, it's simply not going to be able to run the rest of the game, and it's out of the match regardless of what you do unless the game slows down permanently for everyone.
If you could simply wait a few seconds for them to catch up, they'd also be able to catch up without a global pause.
In any case, we're going in circles. I came to this thread to claim that "If one person lags, everyone lags." is not intrinsic to this kind of net code, and you disagreed. Company of Heroes and my own games are existence proof of my claim. I'm not really interested in arguing about it any more - millions of players can't be wrong.
If you could simply wait a few seconds for them to catch up, they'd also be able to catch up without a global pause.
In any case, we're going in circles. I came to this thread to claim that "If one person lags, everyone lags." is not intrinsic to this kind of net code, and you disagreed. Company of Heroes and my own games are existence proof of my claim. I'm not really interested in arguing about it any more - millions of players can't be wrong.