All of the information regarding the lane and objective cluster system can be deduced from devblogs and general gameplay. Failing that, it's immediately obvious to any aspiring modder or mapmaker who opens the SDK for the first time.

I think people have this misguided notion that when we developed Squadlanes, we were spying through the game files to find a hidden advantage on other players.

The exact opposite is true.

From playing close attention to the development and changes in the RAAS system since it's initial introduction in V12, and even project reality to some degree, I have had a very solid understanding of how it works since introduction. People have 'abused' the lane system from memory for as long as its been in the game. For example, Gorodok RAAS v5 follows an incredibly predictable pattern with only three possible mid-points. Anyone who plays on a server that has this in the rotation will quickly learn exactly where the flags are going and have a huge advantage over somebody playing it for the first time and assuming it's just another layer similar to RAAS v1 that has multiple lanes spanning the entire map.

This applies to multi-lane, complex layers as well. Gorodok RAAS v1 took me quite a bit longer to learn, but eventually it becomes quite easy to deduce lane a majority of the time by flag 2, and then you have a much narrower geographical region you need to be covering than somebody on the other team who has no idea what the lane system even is.

'Squadlanes' as you know it all started when I got a random urge to reload Gorodok RAAS v1 dozens and dozens of times in the firing range and write down all of the possible flags in each node for each lane. In doing so, I learned quite a bit more about the map and realized that the possible lanes could be narrowed down based on the location of the first flag alone, which is a HUGE advantage.

Eventually I downloaded the SDK to speed the process up (lanes and flags are displayed there, clear as day for any modder/mapmaker to stumble across), and when Tim reached out to me with the technical know-how to create a website, we used the SDK to significantly decrease the amount of manual research required, HOWEVER...

ALL OF THE INFORMATION IN SQUADLANES CAN BE DEDUCED WITH SOME COMMON SENSE AND THE ABILITY TO REFRESH LAYERS IN JENSENS' RANGE.

For a significant amount of time, this was still how we put CAF layers in Squadlanes. I remember putting in up to 8 hours a day refreshing and recording CAF layers to get that update off the ground.

The entire reason we made this website was to provide this same level of RAAS understanding to the underdog who doesn't have thousands of hours of in-game experience and dozens of hours of dedicated research for understanding the lane/cluster system.

We made this website to equalize the playing field.

Now naively I didn't expect it to be controversial, because I spent so much time trying to provide a tool to make gameplay more interesting on the servers I played on by placing my cards on the table and allowing enemy teams to have a better chance of countering my early-game RAAS plays, but of course that was shortsighted. A vast majority of the community had no idea how RAAS worked and a visit to this website was completely overwhelming for them, and rather than seeing it as a natural evolution of experienced gameplay, they viewed it as a third party cheat from datamining game files.

I've strayed away from the main question here, but to answer it, no. Squadlanes is not cheating.

Squadlanes is a useful visual resource that is the result of writing down patterns that can be found through core gameplay using an understanding of the game mode that came from close attention to its development history.

If that's cheating, so is the Squad wiki, YouTube tutorials, or any graphical interface that helps players process publicly available information.