One thing that does need to be cleared up as many people do asume that all games on PSN are on dedicated servers, they are not. Some games are, some games are not. For some games, PSN does act as only a matchmaker. Typically it is the Sony first party games that have dedicated servers. After that it is a bit spotty. This has been proven by people analyzing network traffic coming from their PS3.
That being said, it would be nice if XBL had more options to run dedicated servers or Microsoft ran some dedicated servers themselves. User hosted games usually have the host advantage problem. The solution that I would love (but this would never, ever, happen) is for the option to run dedicated servers on PCs that connect to XBL through the Live service.
PSN still has a ways to go to catch up on features. Overall it is nice to see competition driving the evolution of features. When PSN gets closer to XBL it will prod Microsoft to add more features to XBL and possibly lower it's price. Of course it could go the other way too and it could prove too expensive for Sony to implement many of the changes and they may have to start charging for enhanced features in PSN. Just have to see how it all plays out.
I give this thread a 9.3.
Thank god for the disable signatures option.
