Danny Ocean said:
TheComedown said:
But they still have to go through a main server to set up the match making etc, and they (the main servers) are in America, the system is fairly shitty.
Like how torrent sites don't host data, just point you to those who do?
Basically. A better example is how the gamespy client worked. The client itself had no functionality beyond displaying a list of servers and passing a particular start-up string to the game (in my case, Quake). It pulled these servers from a regularly updated listing. When you join a game of MW2, it quickly pulls the list of available games, finds ones with sufficient slots for your party, and then joins by (I suspect) ping. If no suitable games are found after a period, the person who launches the game becomes the host.
If the lag trips a certain threshold, the server is transferred to another player. While I don't suspect that the algorithm is directly biased, it is possible that the threshold for choosing to swap to a new server is. Rather than looking at lag across the board, a handful of very terrible connections may prove sufficient. Thanks to wretched internet service that apparently exists in Australia, it is possible that choosing an Australian server, even in a game consisting mostly of Australian players, would result in a poor enough connection for a handful of players that dealing with a few hundred ms worth of lag is considered preferable.
