A lot of people have been asking about this new Call of Duty server-side culling system, so here’s the simplest way to explain it and why I don’t think it automatically means wallhacks are dead.
First, this idea is not new. Similar concepts have existed for decades, going all the way back to old Counter-Strike public servers and anti-cheat plugins. The basic problem has always been simple. ESP and wallhacks work because the game server sends your PC information about other players, things like position, movement, health and other data, even when your actual game is not showing those players to you yet. If that information exists somewhere on the client, software or external hardware can potentially read it and turn it into ESP.
What Call of Duty is trying to do now is attack the information itself. Instead of sending every enemy’s location to your PC and hoping RICOCHET catches anybody reading it, the server can simply refuse to send information about players you should not know about yet. If your computer never receives somebody’s coordinates, there is nothing sitting in memory for ESP to magically pull out. In a perfect world, that absolutely hurts traditional wallhacks.
The problem is we do not live in that perfect world. We live in COD servers.
No online game has a flawless connection between every client and the server. You have ping spikes, jitter, packet loss, server lag, people playing from different regions, high-ranked players being matched farther away because the game needs to fill a lobby, VPN users and about 47 other networking problems before somebody even fires a bullet.
That creates a major problem for a system like this. Imagine the server waits until an enemy is actually visible before sending their information to you. The other player’s client may receive your information first because of latency while your PC is still waiting on theirs. Now they can see you, shoot you and possibly kill you before their character has even been properly revealed on your side.
Basically, Call of Duty would defeat wallhacks by giving everybody the deluxe version of “bro, I didn’t even see him.”
That is why I seriously doubt they can run this system as strictly as it sounds in the video. Other games and anti-cheat systems have experimented with similar ideas and usually need some kind of prediction, buffer or visibility window so normal players do not get destroyed by desync.
A more realistic version would be the server sending enemy information slightly before you actually need it. Maybe based on distance, line of sight, movement, speed, connection quality or whether somebody is approaching an area where they could realistically become visible.
The 100-meter and 300-meter numbers people are discussing are examples and theories, not confirmed COD settings. But the logic is easy to understand. Maybe the server only gives your PC information about enemies within 100 meters. That could protect against full-map ESP while still giving the game enough breathing room to deal with latency.
But knowing how fast COD moves and how questionable the networking can already be, maybe they need a much larger window, possibly something closer to 300 meters. If that happens, full-map ESP could disappear while ESP inside a smaller radius, maybe 100 to 200 meters or whatever their actual system ends up allowing, could still remain useful.
And honestly, even that would still be a win for RICOCHET. Taking somebody from seeing the entire map to only receiving information about players inside a limited relevance area is a serious reduction in what traditional ESP can do.
But that is completely different from saying wallhacks no longer work.
Once the server decides an enemy is relevant and starts sending their information to the client, that information exists again. At that point, external systems can potentially process whatever data the server has legitimately provided. They can also retain previously received information, analyze movement direction, timing and velocity and attempt to predict where somebody went after direct updates stop.
The important word there is predict.
If the server genuinely stops sending live position updates, nothing can magically know the exact new coordinates from data that does not exist. The longer somebody stays hidden and keeps moving, the less accurate that last-known position becomes. So this system can absolutely damage the perfect “I know exactly where everybody is through every wall across the map” type of ESP.
It just does not necessarily mean the advantage disappears completely. It changes.
Instead of having the whole map handed to you like Google Maps with enemy locations turned on, you may only get information when the server decides somebody is close enough, visible enough or relevant enough to your player.
That is why everything depends on Call of Duty’s final implementation.
If they somehow build the system aggressively enough that hidden player information genuinely stays off the client until the last possible safe moment, while also compensating perfectly for ping, movement, packet loss and server delay, then yes, this could become a very serious problem for wallhacks.
If they have to leave a big safety window so legitimate players do not experience enemies teleporting into existence, then wallhacks may lose full-map awareness but still operate whenever somebody enters that allowed window.
And that is really the entire chess match.
Call of Duty builds a wall. Somebody measures it. COD makes the wall taller. Somebody brings a ladder. COD takes the ladder away. Somebody starts shopping for a trampoline.
Cybersecurity chess with guns.
And DMA does not magically escape this either. DMA was never invented for cheating. Direct Memory Access is normal computer technology used in legitimate hardware all over the place. Cheat developers simply found ways to abuse external hardware because it operates differently from traditional software running directly inside the game.
But server-side culling attacks DMA from the same angle it attacks everything else. If the server never sends an enemy’s exact position to the gaming PC, there is no exact position sitting there for DMA hardware to read either.
Once that information legitimately reaches the client, external systems may still process whatever information becomes available. That is why DMA does not suddenly become useless, but it also does not make somebody immune to server-side protections.
So I would not panic and I definitely would not start writing the obituary for cheating yet. Let the system actually release and let people test it under real COD conditions. Right now everybody is arguing over a system we have not even seen fully implemented.
My prediction is simple. This probably hurts full-map wallhacks a lot. It probably forces ESP to operate with less information. It probably makes cheat developers change how their systems work.
But “harder” and “impossible” are two completely different words.
If you are using any external hardware, just understand that no setup is guaranteed invisible or permanently safe. RICOCHET keeps evolving and so does the other side.
For now, enjoy the game, enjoy your setup and stop acting like Call of Duty solved a 20-year-old cybersecurity problem in one update.
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