Methods for syncing new players

Iamspiff

Let's say I join a match after its already been started for like 10 minutes and there's pickups, collectibles, weapons, ects... is there an ideal way to update new players such as my example above to any changes that may occur post game start like who picked up a weapon or item without using buffers? The one solution I've come up with is storing specific state information for everything that I could possibly want any player to update into a string and basically requesting that info from the master, but it seems like a not very elegant solution.