How to Fix Cheating From Trusting Client-Reported Hit Detection

In your shooter the client reports its own hits and the server applies the damage. A cheat client then claims perfect hits or impossible angles. Move the hit decision to the server, rewinding to the shooter's view for fairness, and reject shots that could not have happened.

How to fix it

1. Validate hits server-side

Have the client send the shot (origin, direction, timestamp) and let the server perform the trace. Do not let the client assert that a hit occurred.

2. Use lag-compensated rewind

Rewind the target's position to the shooter's reported time within a bounded window so honest high-ping shots count, while constraining the window to limit abuse.

3. Reject impossible shots

Sanity-check fire rate, recoil, and angle between consecutive shots, and discard hits that violate the weapon's constraints or come faster than possible.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unreal Engine error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.