Destroyer_anon

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.

It's available on the latest firmware, please update to that and you'll be able to do this.

The R3 does it's job but it can't magically make your bullets register how they should, that's up to the game and your opponents - the matchmaking doesn't prioritise the connection of your opponents, so when you get connected to laggy people from across the country most of the time, you're going to get poor hit registration no matter what router you're using. I sit single digit pings but get penalised heavily, the game just feels delayed when there's people with crap connections in the match. If everyone's under 20ms (rare) it feels amazing. They've tried to make the game playable for everyone no matter your ping but it's not perfect, there's a reason why people geo filter to servers further away to increase their ping, or why some Japanese/Chinese connect to the Australian servers on purpose.
MWIII has given me the worst experience i've had in cod in a long time. My KD is around 2.8 now but I was probably negative the first 2 months from how awful it ran. That's the lowest i've had since like OG MW3 and I'm surprise it's even gotten there with how bad it runs. The only router that has made this game remotely playable is the R2 or R3 - no other router has given me playable matches until recently, I decided to switch to my old Asus router I was running as an AP to router mode and it has been giving me some smooth hit rego. It's running Merlin firmware, I have no fancy settings, just set my console to priority and using Adaptive QoS with my full bandwidth set up. I have found matches run bad if I throttle bandwidth low, unlike some of the older cods.
Some people that I occasionally play with have no issues whatsoever playing via WiFi and they're sitting on 30-70ms ping due to their location. When I vs them for fun in public lobbies, they have the type of connection where you're dead before you can ADS.. they are just synced to the server much earlier than you and have the lag comp on their side. I've tried bumping up my ping but it doesn't give the same experience as having a high ping by default. Maybe it's related to the routing.

This isn’t a support post, this is just a post from a hardcore call of duty ranked player giving my honest review of the router. Because ive been seeing soooo much negativity about this router.
Ive been playing ranked play on call of duty modern warfare 3 on pc for about 8 hours a day. I can honestly say the netduma r3 melts my enemies. I’ve tried multiple different routers so I know how each router feels when you’re playing competitively when every millisecond counts! I’ve tried Openwrt, Ubiquiti, Arista, Mikrotik, Pfsense and Asus ROG routers. They all do very good A+ 0ms bufferbloat with QOS. BUT the problem with those routers is the hit detection / lag comp. Where you clearly see the enemy and shoot them first and you die first. It’s like you shoot nerf bullets and they just INSTA DELETE you!
I don’t know how netduma does it but this router is manipulating the lag comp / hit detection to give you a advantage. I mean theres still some moments when I’m like how did I lose that gunfight but it’s ALOT less compared to those other routers.
The latest firmware still has some bugs that I’m sure is going to be fixed.. but the firmware is more than playable for me
Anyone else feels this way or its only me?