The other option for competitive pvp is trusted peer hosts (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, November 03, 2016, 07:57 (3034 days ago) @ Earendil

I hope D2 uses a single server and they put it just across the lake at Bungie HQ. You guys will have shitty pings but I'll become a PVP god.

It's all well and good for those of us in major cities or play with people from all over. But if you live a little ways off the beaten-internet-path and play with local friends, a dedicated server is going to make their experience worse. There are always tradeoffs.

TItanfall 1 did this, and so do most (maybe all?) CoD games:

The servers keep track of players' connection quality, disconnects, and reports of cheating, and establish lists of which consoles that are capable of hosting games are also trustworthy. Those then become default hosts for a standard host/client peer to peer setup (where the host system is the arbiter of who hit what and where people moved etc.). Players who lag-switch or frequently disconnect will find that they are never the host and therefore their cheats don't work (a lag switching client in a traditional client/host networking scheme is just a guy standing perfectly still, waiting to be shot - they aren't immune to damage or able to fire time-traveling bullets like they are in Destiny).