kotaku: Destiny 2 for PC, won't carry over year 1 characters (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 21:40 (3070 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Each system tells all of the others whether or not it took damage, or moved, or actually was where the other systems thought it was, and each system spends a lot of time guessing at where lagging players are, which results in showing avatars on screen that are out of sync with the true location of the other players. This can also be intentionally exploited via lag-switching in ways that a standard host-client pvp model cannot be.

Host-client networking models also involve clients telling the host what they're doing and where they are, and the clients also predictively guess where the other clients are and such. And host-client systems can also resolve requests from clients with various approaches and different degrees of trust. The things you're observing in-game do not imply that there's no host.

The lack of super-obvious host migration sort of hints at a lack of host, but we've been told that PvE uses a host-client model and that they're just handling the (very frequent) migrations really seamlessly in those modes.

I'd guess that the networking systems in PvE and PvP are very similar, but people perceive them differently because of the differences in how encounters flow, and because of technically different constraints on predicting human players versus AI (humans need their own screens to be responsive and thus necessarily will be highly desynchronized from other players, whereas AI can be forced to be somewhat well-synchronized without any humans controlling them complaining about latency).
Much in the same way that people praise Halo 1's enemy AI for being brilliant while complaining that the friendly AI is idiotic, even though they're basically the same.