2 ms·

Then why not have the network self-organize into its lowest latency form with the "server" acting as a trusted arbiter / validator?

• potatolicious 16y ago
  This does happen in some games - the Halo series comes to mind. A player is determined to be the "server" based on network conditions, and the plus side of it is also that should the server drop, the game will only be momentarily interrupted and you can select a new player to act as the server. This doesn't work in all instances - most games using this mechanism are fairly small in terms of player count, since the server is not of a guaranteed performance level, the connection its on is probably a home-based broadband connection at best, and it has to invest a lot of cycles into rendering the game. For larger games (say, the Battlefield series) the hardware required makes it such that the system is infeasible. Instead you have extremely beefy hardware running dedicated servers - headless, non-rendering servers that can throw every cycle it has into serving the game.