Let's say that I have a game server located in my country which is hosted by my ISP. For example, I pinged their game server and I got 10 ms ping, and let's say the game features the ability to host the game by your machine (listen server) instead.
So let's say that my friend is going to be hosting that game and I'm going to join him and rely on his connection to me, and suppose he lives just next to my home and we have the same ISP. Is it possible that I'm going to get ping times of around 10 ms just like dedicated server or will be higher? If yes, is it because the limitations of the machine itself, or what could be the cause?
Thanks.
A listen server would actually have the ping timing being dependent upon the machine hosting the game and the game latency would eventually depend on your machine and your connection.
Whereas if you have a dedicated server, the ping timing would not be affected by your connection overload or any sort of such network problems.
Also the ping timing depends on the distance but in a particular residential area every ping would be routed through a majorly one router and hence the ping timings would not be different.
As for the model, I guess you should go for dedicated server because it provides better performance. For more information you could check out the following link:
http://www.gameskinny.com/pqdqx/dedicated-servers-vs-peer-to-peer-connections