In PvP games, anti-cheat systems are always crucial. If there are too many cheaters, legitimate players will quickly leave, and the game can eventually devolve into a battle between cheaters and their cheats.
Call of Duty series has been fighting cheaters for years, but the problem is extremely difficult to eliminate completely. The official team behind Modern Warfare 4 has now introduced a new layer of anti-cheat protection called Server Culling, with the goal of significantly limiting the effectiveness of wall hacks in the game.
What is Server Culling?
The system is known as Server Culling, and it is not an entirely new technology in the industry. Games such as Counter-Strike have used similar mechanisms before.
Without this system, the position of every player or game client is continuously sent to the server, which then shares that information with all other clients.
This data sharing is exactly what gives wall hacks an opportunity to work. Cheats can read the data sent to the client, translate the positions and character states of other players, and then overlay that information onto the player's screen. This allows cheaters to see enemies through walls and determine what they are doing.
Server Culling takes a completely different approach. It creates occlusion layers on the server side, and these layers correspond to surfaces within the map.
When an enemy is behind an occlusion layer and outside your line of sight, the server simply does not send that player's positional data to your client.
The data never reaches the client, while cheats need client-side data to function. Without that data, a wall hack has no way to know where an enemy is or what state they are in, so it naturally cannot display them.
More importantly, cheats cannot access server-side data and can only access information available on the client itself. That makes this technology highly effective against wall hacks.
For players who stick to fair play and never cheat, you can buy CoD Modern Warfare 4 Bot Lobbies to familiarize yourself with the maps and explore useful positions on your own. This allows you to anticipate enemy movements through map knowledge rather than relying on wall hacks.
How Does Server Culling Work?
Of course, the client still needs to know the positions of players within its field of view, otherwise it would not be able to render their character models. Therefore, the system needs to be tuned very carefully, especially when dealing with interpolation in an online game.
The system does not place an additional burden on your device. In fact, it reduces the amount of data that needs to be processed by the client, which can actually lower the amount of client-side processing required.
However, the system could still have some negative effects on regular players, such as increased latency, desync, or players suddenly appearing when they quickly move around a corner.
If player information fails to reach the client in time, issues like these could theoretically occur. Ultimately, however, the result depends on how well the system is tuned.
UAV
Some players want to know how the system will interact with the mini map when a UAV is active in the air.
The official team behind Modern Warfare 4 addressed this question, explaining that UAV data is owned and controlled by the server and only provides limited positional information that the server intends to share.
Therefore, it cannot simply be treated as a replacement for player data, nor can it provide the complete information that wall hacks rely on. That is certainly a reassuring answer.
Limitations Of The New System
Many players were unhappy about the official team revealing this mechanism, arguing that it effectively gives cheat developers a blueprint. By the time the game officially launches, cheat developers may already have found ways around it.
In general, anti-cheat systems should avoid revealing too many details because the more information available, the easier it becomes for cheat developers to look for workarounds.
In this case, however, there is no real workaround to the core mechanism because the data simply does not exist on the client. As long as the data is not present on the client, cheats have nothing to access and therefore cannot use it. That is exactly why this approach is particularly effective against wall hacks.
Of course, this does not mean Modern Warfare 4 will completely eliminate all forms of cheating. Ace emphasized that this is simply another layer of protection added on top of the existing anti-cheat systems.
Cheating and anti-cheat measures will always be a cat-and-mouse game, and cheaters will continue looking for loopholes. Whenever the official team announces improvements to its anti-cheat measures, there is bound to be some form of pushback.
Advanced Cheat Threats
This anti-cheat system can only address part of the problem. CoD MW4 will also need to defend against DMA cheats.
DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. It allows cheaters to run cheat software on a second computer and then display the resulting information on the main gaming monitor through some form of overlay. Since the actual software runs on another computer, this approach can potentially bypass anti-cheat systems entirely.
If a DMA wall hack also retrieves player positions from the game in the same way, it should also be affected by Server Culling upgrade.
However, DMA can also be used to run an aimbot from a second PC. This is one of the biggest concerns surrounding DMA because it is extremely difficult to detect.
Another concern is bulletproof accounts. These accounts are essentially immune to large numbers of reports. They can cheat openly and aggressively, yet when you report them, an error may appear saying that the profile cannot be retrieved.
At least based on the attitude demonstrated by the official team, the response to cheating in COD MW4 is being taken very seriously. However, because the cheating industry is so large, more new techniques will continue to emerge. Developers will need to come up with increasingly creative ways to deter the large number of cheaters.
