Server-side anti-cheat can make wall hacks based on hidden enemy positions much less useful—but only if the game server withholds those positions from the player’s device until they are needed. A server can control which game state is accepted without keeping every piece of that state secret from clients. Riot’s VALORANT Fog of War is a documented example of limiting this information leak, not proof that server-side systems stop every kind of cheat.
Can server-side anti-cheat stop wall hacks?
It can blunt one important kind of wall hack: a cheat that reads enemy positions already delivered to a player’s computer and draws them through walls. Hiding or changing what the game renders on that computer does not protect information the computer already has. If the server does not send a hidden opponent’s position, a client-side wallhack cannot reveal that position from the withheld data alone.
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That protection depends on what the server sends, not merely on whether the server is authoritative. Server authority means the server governs accepted game state instead of trusting a client’s account of the world. Riot’s 2020 netcode explanation describes its design principle this way: “a server must never trust a client’s view of the world.” That can limit cheats that manipulate a client’s reported actions, but it does not by itself prevent the client from inspecting opponent data the server has transmitted.
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In Riot Games’ April 14, 2020 engineering account, VALORANT’s Fog of War system is designed to keep enemy positions from reaching opposing players while those enemies are behind cover, then provide relevant state as an opponent approaches visibility. Anti-cheat lead Paul “Arkem” Chamberlain summarized the goal: “If an opponent was behind a wall, we wouldn’t send their location to enemy players, keeping them hidden until they decided to peek the angle.”
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The challenge is deciding when an enemy is visible without making the game feel unfair or broken. A system that sends the location only after an opponent is fully exposed may deliver it too late: network delay can make that opponent appear to pop into view. Sending it too early reduces that problem, but means the client receives some information before the opponent is directly visible.
Why simple line-of-sight checks fell short
Riot’s first prototype used server-side raycasts to check whether cover blocked the view between players. A ray to an actor’s center can give the wrong answer when part of the actor is visible but the center is occluded. Riot tested a 10-ray approach to account for more of an actor’s shape, but its article says this was still fallible and would make that check 10 times more expensive than using one ray. In testing, visibility errors included enemies appearing late or remaining hidden when they should have been seen.
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Using Potentially Visible Sets and a look-ahead
Riot’s documented implementation instead uses Potentially Visible Sets (PVS). The map is divided into cells, and visibility relationships between cells are calculated ahead of time. At runtime, the server can look up whether areas may be visible rather than repeatedly performing the more expensive ray tests. The check is deliberately optimistic: if any part of one voxel can see any part of another, it treats the areas as visible.
Riot also describes expanding actor bounds according to velocity and a look-ahead interval larger than expected ping. This gives the server a way to provide relevant state shortly before an enemy could become visible, allowing time for it to reach the client. The approach trades strict withholding until visual exposure for smoother, more timely appearances.
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What happens to animation and effects while an enemy is hidden?
Withholding an actor’s network state can leave the client without updates needed to display that actor correctly when it reappears. Riot describes problems with incorrect animation and event state after an actor emerged from Fog of War. Its response was to build Effect Containers, a mechanism that could restart effects and fast-forward them when the actor became visible again. In practice, hiding positions is therefore not just a visibility calculation: the game also has to reconcile what the client missed.
What Fog of War does not establish
- It addresses a particular information channel. If hidden coordinates are never sent, a cheat relying on those coordinates loses that source of information. The mechanism alone does not establish protection against every cheat, other information leaks, audio or ability cues, or information obtained outside the game client.
- Server authority and secrecy are separate protections. A server may decide which actions and game states are valid while still sending clients more opponent data than they need. Preventing a client from learning hidden state requires controlling that data flow.
- Visibility decisions involve latency and fairness. Aggressively withholding data can cause late appearances; sending it earlier can expose information before direct visual contact. Riot’s look-ahead method is one implementation-specific compromise.
- Map and engine details matter. Visibility geometry, actor bounds, precomputed map data, animations, and effects all affect whether the approach behaves correctly. Riot’s implementation is not a guarantee that another game can adopt the same design unchanged.
What Riot reported about performance
Riot’s 2020 account says its production Fog of War system used less than 2% of server frame time, compared with 50% for its first prototype. These are Riot-reported figures for VALORANT’s implementation, not independent measurements or a general performance expectation for other games. They illustrate how substantially implementation choices affected the cost in that particular system.
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How this differs from other proposed approaches
A peer-reviewed paper by Seonghyun Park, Adil Ahmad, and Byoungyoung Lee, “BlackMirror: Preventing Wallhacks in 3D Online FPS Games,” appeared in the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security proceedings. Its publication record frames protected execution and visibility testing, including Intel SGX, as a research approach. That record does not establish that the method was deployed in a production game or provide a production performance comparison.
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The available examples do not offer a controlled head-to-head test of Fog of War, server authority alone, and protected-execution proposals. They differ in what they try to protect and in their integration demands; a fair comparison would also need to measure visibility timing, server or hardware cost, map and engine update work, and how each handles state when an entity reappears.
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How much does server-side anti-cheat reduce wallhacks?
The documented mechanism gives a clear explanation of how a game can stop a client from using enemy coordinates it never received. Riot’s account also describes the engineering compromises required to make that work smoothly. It does not supply an independently verified current effectiveness rate, a general industry prevalence figure, or evidence that wallhacks or cheating have been eliminated. The defensible conclusion is narrower: server authority can constrain some client manipulation, while carefully limiting transmitted enemy state can reduce a specific source of information for wallhacks.
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