I was originally going to just skirt this post, but then you had to come and call it a competitive game, which it is not, and also I'm kind of tired of seeing the same thing ten times over every day, so let's just end it here, now. As an independent game developer, this is a question that comes up very frequently in discussion with potential players, but unless you actually have a network coding background you really wouldn't understand, so here goes. [i]There is a minimal difference between the two networking models as it pertains to game latency[/i]. There, I said it. But Phantom you say, this is obviously not true because every game I play that has dedicated servers is almost lag free and I'm almost always prone to lag in Destiny. The problem you're experiencing here, has almost nothing to do with the source connection, unless the provider of the source connection is just terrible by today's standards, which most games can very easily detect. And dedicated servers experience the same "distance" issue you sometimes experience as well, there's no avoiding it, period. What you're experiencing is a problem with the networking layer of the game itself, and it's very easy to spot these issues in both sides of the game. The Destiny Servers (Which handle things like API requests) are consistently pinging each client with packet requests, which the game's socket system then must process. Meanwhile, the networked instances (Almost everywhere), must also handle requests from the other players, as well as which ever game instance is designated as the "host" instance, if you want to see this for yourself, download the Wireshark program, and have it listen to your console's IP address while you play, you'll see hundreds of requests add up in a manner of seconds. The problem is not that your console can't handle it, it's that the game is still capped at older console standards, even when you're playing on the XB1/PS4, and that's just there to make the code base all that easier to manage for the developers. This is why I find this topic to be completely pointless, and one that needs to go into a hole, and burn already. D2 is running exclusively on the new console generation and PC instances, the hold back isn't going to be an issue here. Don't believe me? Wait until the beta and see for yourself. Secondly, as Bungie has stated, hosting dedicated servers for the scale of the game here would be absolutely silly in these regards, as you would need to either purchase or rent hundreds to even thousands of them to be able to meet the needs of the entire playerbase at a given time. Do the math on those costs, and tell me it's a worthwhile investment. [b]Quick Edit:[/b] Lots of great conversation in here, thanks folks. Looks like Bungie has heard your voices, I highly recommend you read the BWU, it's got a bit in there on how the networking model has changed for D2, and as I suspected, it would appear that many of the issues are being fixed.