Squad's Competitive Scene Just Took a Major Hit, and May Not Recover

Squad's Competitive Scene Just Took a Major Hit, and May Not Recover originally appeared on GameDaily .

Squad is an ultra-realistic milsim that has slowly grown in popularity over the last couple of years. It peaked in popularity in October of 2024 with nearly 40,000 concurrent players. The game places players in squads of up to 9 that are part of a larger team of 50, with each squad having a lead that reports to the team's commander. The ability for squad leads and their commander to communicate via voicechat creates a greater sense of teamplay than other large-scale FPS games.

The need for communication between all 50 members of the team has helped create a hyper-committed playerbase that eventually spawned an official competitive scene. The inaugural Esports tournament recently took place from mid-June to early July, culminating in a finals match between teams Einherjar and Old Continentals.

A Quick History of Squad's Competitive Scene

Before we get into the details of who cheated and how, some backstory on how competitive Squad works is necessary. Some competitive runs of Squad will use a mod called the Squadcomp mod, or the Squad Arena mod, in order to make competitive gameplay possible. The mod affects map selection, spawn logic, and match rules like run time or respawn timers. There are multiple mods similar to the Squadcomp mod, but this specific mod was chosen for the Esports tournament, and is what made cheating possible for the offenders.

The Squadcomp and Squad Arena mods were created by two users named Hash and Tolgadeg32. They've been part of the competitive scene for years and are members of the team Old Continentals. You know, that same team mentioned earlier that was part of the finals match? You can probably see where this is going...

Details on the Cheating

Shortly after the finals match ended, team Einherjar filed a complaint, stating a discrepancy in their ticket losses when compared to their number of infantry deaths. Squad Esports staff took a closer look at the stream and were able to confirm that something was wrong. Nonoffending members of Old Continentals eventually uncovered the mod, and reported their findings to tournament staff, which brought the roof crashing down on years of cheating for 6 members of the team.

The offending, and now banned, members were:

• Tolgadeg35 (Co-creator of the Squadcomp mod)

• Hash (Co-creator of the Squadcomp mod)

• Healmeister

• Ogii

• SarfSSD

• Farzani

The discovered cheats and their binds, taken from the Squad Esports site , are as follows:

• ALT + L — Start enemy ticket drain

• ALT + K — Stop enemy ticket drain

• ALT + Plus — Instant ammo refill

• ALT + Minus — Show both teams' tickets in the GUI

• SHIFT + P — Toggle admin cam (including for certain hardcoded users)

• ALT + Numpad 8 or 7 — Enable player glow (wallhack)

• ALT + Numpad 9 — Disable player glow

• ALT + Numpad 4 — Enable bone damage modifiers

• ALT + Numpad 3 — Disable bone damage modifiers

• ALT + Numpad 0 — Toggle killfeed UI

• ALT + Numpad * — Lock framerate to 240

• ALT + Numpad / — Randomly lower framerate to 30–44

• ALT + Numpad 1 or 2 — Registered keybinds, player iterator, unclear effects

Upon further review, it was discovered that each offending player, for years on end, had always stated some reason that they could not record their gameplay, usually hardware incompatibility. Call me crazy, but I would assume a computer capable of running and creating mods for Squad should be able to run a basic screen-recording software.

Tournament Fallout and Long-Term Consequences

The direct fallout as it relates to the tournament led to Einherjar being crowned champion, alongside the Old Continentals withdrawing. Ironically, the tournament page from Squadcomp's website still has Old Continentals as the winners. I suppose cheaters do have inherently bad taste.

So, why are fans concerned about the scene's ability to recover? Unfortunately, the Squadcomp and Squad Arena mods have been around for years and have been used for dozens of competitive matches. All of the matches in which Old Continentals competed and also used these mods are now held in illegitimacy. There was already minimal interest, and the revelation of two of the most prominent figures in the scene being serial cheaters has effectively killed all of the hype from the new Esports tournaments.

Only time will tell whether there will be future Esports tournaments for the game. If there's enough hype this far down the line to warrant an inaugural tournament, I'm sure there will be an effort made to have more down the line. Maybe having cheaters outed in the first tournament is a good thing, and will lead to a sense of security, and therefore more signups for future tournaments. Or maybe it will kill the hype completely, and people will funnel into one of the other milsims currently available. One thing's for sure: if your idea of fun is dominating in a game where you have an undisclosed and unapproved advantage, you suck.

This story was originally reported by GameDaily on Jul 26, 2025, where it first appeared.