It would also reduce cheating in the game.  The server would be in control of the environment varibles and it coould reset the settings during each lobby.  If a player didn't match the server settings they would receive new settings or be kicked from the lobby.

ghorman wrote:

 

 

• Battlefield  - never had lag issues that wasn't something I created.

 

Never had lag? Please, remove the rose colored blinders.

The lag in BF3 was horrible. I say "was" because I no longer play it... in large part to the lag.

Dedicated servers are not a magic bullet.

ghorman wrote:

 

So, educate us why you think dedicated servers would introduce more lag.  Here are a couple examples where multi-million dollars has choosen this model to improve online performance

• Example 1: Gears 2 to Gears 3 - This was move by Epic to address online lag.
• Example 2: Battlefield  - never had lag issues that wasn't something I created.

 

With multi-datacenters across the country it would in fact reduce the number of hops between the client and host; which would in turn reduce your ping.

It's simple physics combined with an alarming amount of people that play this game. I'll keep this discussion simple for you.

Dedicated Servers: These are data centers located in major cities.

Listen Servers: Allow for a user to become the host of, and participate in, a game.

Let's say that John, who lives in Nebraska, wants to start matchmaking. Instead of searching for local games via listen servers he must now connect to a dedicated server in Denver or Dallas. Physics dicates that he now has more lag as opposed to matchmaking locally with his hometown friends. He might have reached out to Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota or even Colorado within a 2-300 mile radius. However he is now forced to either a 500 or 600 mile destination. What if he wants to game with his East/West Coast friends? That's 1,500 miles to Los Angeles and 1,200 miles to New York. Physics dicates lag. You, nor anyone else, can not overcome physics.

That's not worth it. Battlefield 3 lagged. Gears of War lagged. In fact, Gears of War's entire infastructure isn't supported through dedicated servers. What do we gain? A "solid" host and less cheating? Right...

They need to optimize better, people need to stop being ignorant and that's about it.

This is a very simple breakdown. Things that weren't discussed, the servers having to also connect to Xbox Live, the infastructure of the US network, ISP throttling/qualities, and line degredation/interference.

Im happy i let him explain it.

How many games do you get where every player is within a 50 mile radius?  Never, right now I get lobbies with players from Mexico and New york in the same.  The majority of datacenters are closer to the internet backbone then any Listen server could ever be and most datacenters have a minimun of 3 different major carriers.  I bet you if you do a traceroute on your connection it would take you 7 hops just to get outside of your ISP to the internet.

With a Listen servers you are forcing everyone to travel into the hosts ISP network down to the street level equipment into their house where God knows what they have for equipment.  Jonny could be running on 10 year old equipment.

The closer the servers are to the backbone the less hops for everyone which will reduce ping time.  Common sense.

Things we didn't cover: mutilple tunnels, server clustering, load balancers