OK... when Cain ran under the Win enivronment, it shows a few 65.x.x.x (which are closed, filtered. etc)... BUT, is rampant with local IPs :)... but it is still limited for what I am looking for.
Are they ran off of dedicated servers... Gears of War 3 does, but Halo, and a multitude of Arcade Live games are host dependent.
Mapped 65.x.x.x (4 of them with semi similar numbers) and leads me to Akamai servers.
The rest are... duh duh duh... LOCAL IPs.
Some of them are as little as 2-4 hops (and a bit more, ;)
Most of them will not resolve the hops after 30 tries apiece.
Not sure if this helps our conclusion whether or not there are host players, but I also get IPs from emails and party chats (love the bks who claim I am a power weapon whore)
This brings me to the conclusion that, though there may be servers, it takes the "best" connection and dubs that player host. There is a partial clip of the results (the one on top IS, in fact, my friend from Britain). So, minus the 65.x.x.x, I KNOW that there are viable IPs. But, on the flip side, Cain and Able is the only :out of the box: that automatically detects the IPs.
Does this clue in that is uses hosts that have the best/closest connection to the Akamai servers?