Neither Halo 2 nor Halo 3 use dedicated servers—that is, multiplayer matches in those games are not controlled from a server owned by Bungie or Microsoft. This is also true for Halo: Reach and Halo 4, however Halo 5: Guardians does use dedicated servers. Dedicated servers for Halo 3 alone would have been far too expensive; instead, a distributed networking model is used. In a distributed networking model, one Xbox keeps track of the game, and the other consoles rely on it to manage things like damage and spawns.