Now that Destiny (1 & 2) are end of life and are no longer being actively developed, the game is at risk of a simple business decision which will take the game away from us forever. It's not lost on people that Destiny servers are cloud based, which means they are virtualised, and with that comes the opportunity for Bungie/Sony to make some (not quite trivial) chages to both the client and servers and release them for people to self host.
By no means is this trivial, and I'm certainly not suggesting that this could be completed in a couple of hours by a junior programmer, but at the same time this certainly won't be a six month whole of the company balls to the wall grind.
I would also expect some things to be disabled and unavailable, such as Silver and other monetisation, but I think the recent Project Sunrise release shows that it's possible to use the game without the high dependence of the cloud servers, the only thing stopping that from being playable is the missing instance servers which provide the orchestration of gameplay (monster spawns, triggers, etc).
I won't presume to suggest this is "simple" by any means, there would be a significant amount of work to make it a reality, but for people to host their own servers I would imagine at least the simplest parts of the hosting should be required.
1) The instance server code, this would be the element that provides core gameplay functionality, the ability for monsters and mechanics to operate for players to combat against. I'd argue that Crucible be included in this as well.
2) The "administrative" server code, the stuff like inventory, authentication, etc. This would mean that playing on different servers will result in you maintaining different characters and vaults, etc.
3) Client update (D1, D2, console and PC) with a configurable server (IP or DNS) to join. Heck, even throw in some broadcast to auto detect local servers would be enough for some.
The rest of the game could be stripped back or removed entirely.
Yes, it's awfully presumptive of me to suggest that this could be done at all, however with the proposed EU regulations, and if the rest of the world adopted similar regulations requiring game companies to support online games past their end dates, permitting self hosting could be an fiscally responsible way for Sony to comply with those kind of regulations without requiring any kind of hosting outlay.
I won't address cheating on local instances, that's simply a case of "If there's cheating on those servers, don't play on them".
Anyway, it's a discussion, maybe one worth having.
Source: r/destiny2 · by /u/Xesyliad