This is how I see it going down, considering normal consumer PCs and connection speeds at present:
Current model (CoD4/2/1/UO/WaW/Every successful multiplayer FPS on the PC in the last decade) = Members of the community buy or rent fast machines in data centers hooked to fast internet connections. People connect to those fast machines and play a relatively lag-free game as long as they connect to decent servers on the same continent. Administrators, in conjunction with anti-cheat software, keep their servers clean and fair. If they fail to do that, people don't play on that server anymore. Since the clans are paying for the servers, they have a vested interest in being fair and keeping players happy in the server.
Proposed MW2 model = Some guy with the minimum specs and a $20-a-month internet connection in his mom's basement ends up being the host. Any more than 3 players connect to him, everything lags because he doesn't have the upload speed nor the RAM/CPU to serve all of the clients. He gets killed by someone better than him and kicks them. He can do that because he's the host. Someone doesn't like his connection, so he leaves. When he accesses the matchmaking, it puts him right back in with the same douche he just tried to leave. No one is accountable for anything, everyone is anonymous, most people are douchebags. No one has a vested interest in running a server, they're just playing peer-to-peer. Oh, and the host has a ping of 0. So he has a distinct advantage, and can throttle his network to make other players lag while he kills them.
Now the games are hosted by machines designed to be clients that only run one instance of a game, not beefy servers designed to support hundreds of connections at once.
, but then I pre-ordered for £22.
