Investigation and findings

relevant to Squad Esports

Tournament ticket anomalies

Summary

This investigation is a cumulative work of several people from Old Continentals (OC) since the day after the OC vs ENR final that happened on Sunday 13.07.2025. An investigation of SET servers and their management are outside the scope of this report. However, we encourage an independent review of that angle.

The report's goal is to provide clarity on the situation and provide additional information, which SET and other parties can use to substantiate their claims more. We are also attempting to suggest possible avenues of manipulation, or in worst case, corruption within the Redbox Squad tournament mod used in SET. Because of the nature of the report, what it contains, and people involved in its creation. This report will not be attributed to any specific individual or groups of people, and will stay anonymous. We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Myeggo and his team for uncovering the issue with their statistical analysis upon match’s completion. If not for their insistence upon the SET staff to have this issue investigated, it may not have led to discovery of this report's findings. The conclusion for the OC internal investigation leads us to believe that the "[SC] Competitive Layers Part 1/2" and "[OW] Squad Arena" housed sections of logic inside Unreal "Blueprints" that could allow certain players access to hidden gameplay features giving advantages. A review of the limited access available from the current Steam Workshop version of these mods gives confidence that these features were used during games involving a set of players listed by hardcoded EOS IDs inside the mod itself. We were able to replicate (thus confirming) that these features existed in a test environment.

Immediate next steps

As a result of our findings we recommend the following actions as safety precautions: Ensure you have read the Squad EULA Ensure that third party mod authors and contributors are investigated to ensure no conflict of interest Ensure players who were complicit in foul play are removed from Old Continentals and Squad community + official tournaments Ensure OC members do not have access to any further mods without audit from other parties. Removal of elevated permissions for the players listed under “Who has access?” Old Continentals internal investigation of SET ticket draining scandal Removal of “Redbox Team” mods from your servers; Squad Arena [SC] Competitive Layers Parts 1 and 2 For individual players; unsubscribe from Steam Workshop mods created by “Redbox Team”. Whilst we cannot comment on any further investigations at this time that may lead to additional safety precautions being recommended, we urge that players remain aware of future announcements from Squad Esports or Offword Industries relevant to this matter.

What all this means for us in Old

Continentals

Old Continentals sincerely apologies for the pain this has caused tournament opponents, organisers and the Squad Competitive community as a whole. As a result, we are forfeiting our recent wins in all tournaments that used “RedBox team” created mods, most notably our recent win in the Squad Esports Tournament. We would like to make clear that this investigation represents our desire to rid this community of members involved in foul play, and shows the self-regulating nature of the Squad Competitive community. Every player named in this document has been permanently removed from the team.

Technical analysis

We need to locate some logic inside the mods used on the servers where anomalies appeared to implicate that foul play is at hand, and that the authors of these mods were involved in planting Note: whilst we were able to find a collection of “hidden features”, only a couple are shown in our analysis. Some function logic is extensive and is difficult to represent in text/screenshots in this document.

Who has access?

The first step is to understand how these anomalies only appeared in games involving Old Continentals. Looking at the mod, a list of hardcoded EOS IDs appeared in a variable on the BP_PlayerController_SC25_C called Admins. We saw the following list: "Admins":["0002663f91d347a4b43226f44b6170f3","0002766729ee448dad

70214fb7c8c1ea","00029414bea843beacb6f60715d853c1",

"0002c94417b949608cdfa1bcfdfaebff","000272b8fb31499c81d6a75948ac

e8f6", "000285e814744b7391e467fdd839c113"] The resolves to the following players: 0002663f91d347a4b43226f44b6170f3 | 76561198313878215 | .Tolgadeg35 0002766729ee448dad70214fb7c8c1ea | 76561198859840275 | .Hash 00029414bea843beacb6f60715d853c1 | 76561198132500819 | .Healmeister 0002c94417b949608cdfa1bcfdfaebff | 76561199446792055 | .Farzani 000272b8fb31499c81d6a75948ace8f6 | 76561198381210994 | .Ogii 000285e814744b7391e467fdd839c113 | 76561198855884798 | .SarfSSD

EXCLUSIVE TO ARENA MOD

0002f6848a584ab6ab189806a804e762 | 76561198831796540 | Inception All of the players in the list available in the mod used for Squad Esports Tournament had recently participated in games under OC. To prevent the “hidden features” from being activated by normal players, there is a guard for all given below keybind event handlers to ensure that the player who pressed the keybind has their matching EOS ID existing in the above list of “Admins”.

Ticket Bleed

Existing on BP_PlayerController_SC25_C

Function InpActEvt_Alt_L_K2Node_InputKeyEvent_8 (keybind “ALT” + “L”)

this calls a function named tu.

This function gets the player’s EOS ID and compares against the local variable Admins

(as listed above). If matching, it binds an event to variable TicketUpdate with

parameters Active as true and Team as an integer representing the enemy team ID.

In the gamemode blueprint (BP_GameMode_AAS_SC25_C) in the game start callback

(ReceiveBeginPlay), a loop iterates over all players, gets their PlayerController

(BP_PlayerController_SC25_C) and binds variable TicketUpdate to this

CustomEvent_0 if active. This event handler has some checks to ensure the tick timer is not already running, then it creates a new repeating timer (calling function named

tick) with interval 30 (seen with the parameter given in the function call labelled by

FloatConst).

The tick timer handler depletes tickets (as seen by

SQTeamState->AdjustTickets) for some Team ID (provided by custom event) by

value of variable lose (hardcoded as -1 in the mod)

There is a similar function named tun adjacent (under keybind “ALT” + “K”) that disables this ticket bleed See images below for relevant nodes in execution flow analysis

Mesh View

Existing on BP_PlayerController_SC25_C

Function InpActEvt_Alt_NumPadEight_K2Node_InputKeyEvent_4 (keybind

“ALT” + “NUMPAD 7”) This sets var MeshUpdateActive to true if the player EOS ID

belongs to the Admins list (hardcoded to the players mentioned). This is intended to enable the caster feature such that buildings are shown as their 3D mesh and are translucent.

Ticket View

Existing on BP_PlayerController_SC25_C

Function InpActEvt_Alt_Subtract_K2Node_InputKeyEvent_5 (keybind "ALT" + NUMPAD "-") When pressed, this toggles a widget showing both team's tickets to the player's screen Again guarded behind checking player is "Admin"

Attempts to reproduce

Ticket Counter GUI

We've been able to replicate some of the keybinds that are shown in the blueprints for the mod. As and example one of these is the keybind combination that allows the user to see each team’s tickets (“Left ALT” + “-”). In vanilla Squad, this is a feature that's

reserved to individuals that are in admin cam (shift+p) who use the bind “4” to showcase tickets for each team. Individuals who have their steamids hardcoded into the mod are capable of showcasing that on their pov, without having to go into admincam. Other exploits such as, ammo bag/rally exploit and ticket drain have also been verified and confirmed as working.

Ticket drain showcase

The controversy started with individuals noticing mysterious ticket bleed happening in the game. What was bizarre was the unexplainable differences between deaths on the regular scoreboard, compared to “soldier deaths” in the details screen. We now believe that we have evidence proving how it transpired via the ticket drain toggle mentioned before. Details in the screenshots and video below;

Video

In the link provided, you will find footage demonstrating the functionality of the keybinds. It shows the following: Ticket drain on keypress. This feature is enabled only after 300 seconds into a round. It can't be toggled before this point. Ticket counter on the top right of the screen. Ammo bag refil.

Screenshots of normal scoreboard and soldier deaths at the end that correspond with the amount of tickets lost via the artificial ticket bleed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaVrUQ653R4

List of all keybinds that were found

Keybinds that have confirmed functions: ALT + L Enables single ticket drain every 30 seconds for enemy team ALT + K Disables ticket drain ALT + Toggles showing both team's tickets in GUI ALT + + Refills player ammunition (ammo bag, rally point) SHIFT + P Toggles admin cam for both server administrators and hardcoded EOS IDs (leading to .Hash and .Tolgadeg35) Keybinds with estimated functions: ALT + NUMPAD * Limits framerate in settings to 240 ALT + NUMPAD / Limits framerate in settings to random number between 30 and 44 ALT + NUMPAD 8 | ALT + NUMPAD 7 Enables player glow (changes player material to glow material) ALT + NUMPAD 9 Disables player glow ALT + NUMPAD 0 Toggles killfeed UI (hardcoded to EOS ID for .Tolgadeg35) ALT + NUMPAD 4 Enables modified player bone damage modifiers (unsure of implications?) ALT + NUMPAD 3 Disables modified player bone damage modifiers ALT + NUMPAD 1 Registered keybind and iterates through players, but unknown function implications ALT + NUMPAD 2 Registered keybind and iterates through players, but unknown function implications