Modern Warfare 4 hides enemy positions from cheaters

Modern Warfare 4 wants to take away what cheaters see through walls. Call of Duty’s anti-cheat team, RICOCHET, unveiled a new layer of protection called Server Culling on 2 October. The idea is easy to grasp: the server simply stops sending your console or PC the position of an opponent you can’t see. A cheat program can’t display information it never receives. How well that holds up will only become clear once millions of players jump in when the game launches on 23 October.

At a glance

How Modern Warfare 4 plans to blind wallhacks

To see why Server Culling matters in Modern Warfare 4, it helps to know how a wallhack works. In many online shooters, your machine receives the position of every nearby player, even those hidden behind a wall, so the game stays smooth. A cheat program only has to read that data and draw it on screen. The cheater then knows where you are before you ever come into view.

With Modern Warfare 4, the RICOCHET team turns that logic around. According to its post on X on 2 October, quoted in full by Blue’s News, the server holds back an opponent’s location data for as long as the player shouldn’t have access to it. An enemy hidden behind scenery effectively vanishes from the cheater’s machine until the moment it becomes visible.

The approach already exists elsewhere: Blue’s News points out that similar methods are used in Valorant and Counter-Strike 2. Bringing it to Call of Duty is still a milestone for the series, which is rolling it out across every map it ships.

Every launch map is covered

According to the RICOCHET team, Server Culling will cover every map available when Modern Warfare 4 launches, including DMZ and Combat Outpost. The protection will then extend to new seasonal maps across Multiplayer, DMZ and Warzone, starting with Season 1. The system therefore applies to the whole game from day one.

Bear in mind that it targets one specific kind of cheat: the kind that relies on hidden enemy positions. Someone using aim assistance software keeps the same ability to snap onto a target once it’s visible, and that type of cheating remains a job for RICOCHET’s other detection tools.

Modern Warfare 4 comes out on 23 October on PS5, Xbox Series, PC and Nintendo Switch 2, according to Worthplaying. Its campaign is set during a North Korean invasion of the Korean Peninsula, as described on the game’s Steam page, and DMZ returns alongside traditional multiplayer.

A fight against cheating that goes beyond the game

The new Modern Warfare 4 tool slots into a wider strategy. In a long post on the official Call of Duty blog on 18 September, the RICOCHET team describes cheating as a proper market, with developers, resellers and subscriptions. It cites an estimate from the threat intelligence platform Intorqa, which puts cheat subscriptions across fifteen games at roughly $3.5bn a year. Intorqa goes further once account sales, boosting and spoofing tools are added, forecasting the wider cheating economy at about $8.5bn a year.

To tackle it, RICOCHET combines in-game detection, account security, mandatory TPM 2.0 on PC and legal action. According to that post, the team has disrupted more than 375 reseller operations, issued more than 80 cease-and-desist demands and helped shut down 31 major cheat vendors. Those figures come from the publisher and haven’t been independently checked.

Other studios are fighting the same battle. Bulkhead, for instance, recently went after players abusing exploits, as we covered in our piece on Wardogs patch 0.1.2 cracking down on exploiters. For Call of Duty players, Server Culling is the most tangible part of RICOCHET’s plan, because it works inside every match. If it lives up to its promise, baffling deaths through walls should become rarer in Modern Warfare 4, and the real test starts at launch, when cheat sellers try to find a way around it.