I’m going to push back on this a bit, because the conclusion being drawn here doesn’t line up with how online games or networks actually work.
I’m an Enterprise Lead Network Engineer with over a decade of experience designing and operating large-scale, latency-sensitive networks (factories, global WANs, DCs, SDN, etc.). I am also a professional competitive CS2 and FortNite player. From a technical standpoint, a consumer router cannot “manipulate lag compensation or hit detection” in the way you’re describing.
How hit registration actually works:
In modern multiplayer shooters (including CoD), hit detection is authoritative on the game server, not the client and certainly not your router.
The general flow looks like this:
Your client sends input events (movement, aim, fire timestamp)
The server rewinds game state using lag compensation
The server determines whether a hit occurred
The result is sent back to all clients
Your router never sees:
Player hitboxes
Server reconciliation logic
Lag compensation algorithms
Damage calculation
It only sees encrypted UDP packets with timestamps. (along with a few checksums that are used on the backend to determine whether there has been any manipulation to the data stream, but that is entirely dependent upon game and AC used).
What lag compensation really is
Lag compensation exists to normalize different client latencies, not to “reward” or “punish” certain players. If two players fire at nearly the same time, the server rewinds state to each client’s perceived moment and resolves the outcome.
This can feel unfair at times, but that’s a function of:
Tick rate
Interpolation / extrapolation
Server load
Packet arrival variance
Player movement prediction
Not the brand of router.
What routers can affect (and what they can’t)
At Layers 1–5, almost every modern router you listed (OpenWRT, MikroTik, pfSense, Ubiquiti, Asus, NetDuma) is doing the same fundamental job:
NAT
Stateful firewall
Packet forwarding
Optional QoS / shaping
This is the ONLY thing that you might be able to argue NetDuma does 'better' than others. However, that is merely if they do it 'out of the box' vs. others that may not considering it's all adherent to RFCs and standardizations, dscp values, etc.
If bufferbloat is already controlled (which you explicitly said it was), then:
Latency is stable
Jitter is minimized
Packet loss is negligible
At that point, there is no mechanism for a router to selectively improve hit registration. It cannot reorder server logic, alter rewind windows, or bias combat resolution.
If it could, competitive esports would ban consumer routers overnight.
Why it feels different
Perceived improvements usually come from:
Different matchmaking servers or routes
Temporary changes in server load
Variance in opponents’ latency
Session-to-session network conditions
Confirmation bias (especially after hardware changes)
Humans are very good at pattern-matching and very bad at controlled experiments, especially when adrenaline and competition are involved.
The key point
If a router could truly “manipulate lag comp”:
It would be detectable by the game developer
It would be considered cheating
It would be patched or blocked immediately
No consumer router has access to the data or control plane required to do that.
Final thought
If you’re enjoying the R3, that’s totally fine. Stable latency and good QoS do matter. But attributing gunfight outcomes to router-level manipulation of hit detection isn’t technically accurate.
The network delivers packets.
The server decides who lives and who dies.
Everything else is perception.