The mojang client will not remove patterns from a Banner when none
are sent inside of an update packet, given that this is not an expected
flow for them, this is not all too surprising. So, we shall resort to always
sending the patterns over the network for update packets.
Spigot still maintains some partial implementation of "tick skipping", a
practice in which the MinecraftServer.currentTick field is updated not
by an increment of one per actual tick, but instead set to
System.currentTimeMillis() / 50. This behaviour means that the tracked
tick may "skip" a tick value in case a previous tick took more than the
expected 50ms.
To compensate for this in important paths, spigot/craftbukkit
implements "wall-time". Instead of incrementing/decrementing ticks on
block entities/entities by one for each call to their tick() method,
they instead increment/decrement important values, like
an ItemEntity's age or pickupDelay, by the difference of
`currentTick - lastTick`, where `lastTick` is the value of
`currentTick` during the last tick() call.
These "fixes" however do not play nicely with minecraft's simulation
distance as entities/block entities implementing the above behaviour
would "catch up" their values when moving from a non-ticking chunk to a
ticking one as their `lastTick` value remains stuck on the last tick in
a ticking chunk and hence lead to a large "catch up" once ticked again.
Paper completely removes the "tick skipping" behaviour (See patch
"Further-improve-server-tick-loop"), making the above precautions
completely unnecessary, which also rids paper of the previous described
incompatibility with non-ticking chunks.
Bjarne Koll