For direct file transfer, I typically just use scp. We were recently sending the files around with IPFS mostly to test its behaviour.

Shameless plug: The main way I am using it, these days, is using Cacophony (a decentralized blogging/vlogging platform I put together).

The other use I have had for it is miscellaneous file transfers between other people: They will stick a big file on IPFS and just E-Mail me the hash so I can grab it. Not as fast as something like BitTorrent but generalizes well (since I was already running it).

Not really since you would minimally need some kind of data consensus if all participants were able to modify the data model. The only real way that you can natively do this on IPFS is via IPNS keys, meaning all participants would own a shard of the data, which wouldn’t really work without some kind of consensus model or a truly sharded data design (which probably isn’t an option for a shared MMO world).

Alternatively, you could have one “blessed” user who can issue updates to a common key, but then you essentially have a client-server system just using IPFS for data distribution. This is probably too heavy-weight for what you would need and introduces other timing and availability concerns.

A decentralized MMO would fit the model of a programmable blockchain a bit better but then it becomes expensive to operate and slow to run (as data model changes couldn’t be made at a higher rate than the block production rate).

I doubt that there is much that they can do about that since they are just a gateway. Even if they were to blacklist every CID they were told about, that would be an impractical whack-a-mole process requiring expensive investigation and appeals structures. This would also then become a problem where legitimate users (for some definition of legitimate) would then be victims of these take-downs.

It is somewhat analogous to demanding that your ISP take down websites you don’t like or block them for all users (which turns into the aforementioned whack-a-mole process): They are just a gateway.

I suspect that you need to educate your users about what is/isn’t real as opposed to expecting some authority to remove the problem. Not a trivial solution, but one which should be far more robust as it is likely to generalize into other permutations of this problem.