A group of my friends have been having regular GT5 evenings using Community > User > My Lounge.
We were wondering how games are physically hosted. Are they managed by one of the PlayStations (denoted by the crown next to the username?) or are they managed by the PSN (GT5? Polyphony?) servers?
Last night the network was dropping out for some of the users and we couldn't work out what was going on. A couple got a "network incompatibility error 717" error. Two racers couldn't see each other for a few of the races.
All of us are in New Zealand and we're using a combination of ethernet cable and wireless. As the word has spread more friends are signing up so we had 6-8 racing last night.
If the game is physically hosted by the first user's PlayStation we need to make sure they are using an ethernet cable and on a fast/low-lag internet connection.
Best Answer
Quoting from the Gran Turismo FAQ:
I know this information covers the Prologue rather than GT5 itself, but I can't find any references to whether or not they changed the networking model between then and GT5. There is no other relevant FAQ entry for GT5, so I'm making the assumption that this information is still valid.
Based on this, it appears that the games are, indeed, hosted by one of the players and not on the PSN servers. If I'm reading this right, the game determines which player has the best connection as the time, so you shouldn't have to worry about it yourself. That said, having more people on a wired instead of wireless connection would help, since their bandwidth still matters for timely communication with other racers through the host.