GunZ Season 1 ended on September 20. Expert is the champion — and Masangsoft never announced it
GunZ’s first official clan tournament ended almost two weeks ago. Expert is the Season 1 champion, after beating Focus 2-0 in the final.
If you did not hear about it, that is not on you. Masangsoft never published an announcement about the result.
The outcome exists, it is official and it is public — it just lives in the database of Triumph, the tournament platform operated by the company itself. That is where the September 16 announcement sent players to register. And that is where the competition ended, in silence.
How we got this
Worth explaining the method, because it matters for judging the information.
The bracket page (tp.masanggames.com/event/49/bracket) is a JavaScript application: opening the address serves no readable data at all. We went after the API behind it by reading the site’s own code, and reached the endpoint that feeds the screen.
Everything in this article came from there: event 49, titled “Clan Battle Tournament Season 1”, marked completed, not secret, with capacity for 16 teams and 22 registered participants.
Two honest caveats: it is a public but undocumented API, and this is internal system state — not an announcement. The company can close that endpoint at any time. We archived the responses.
The full bracket
Times converted by us to Brasília time from the API’s timestamps. The round of 16 and quarter-finals were best-of-one — which is why the 1-0 scores are the format’s normal result, not an anomaly. Semi-finals and the final were best-of-three.
Round of 16 — Friday night, Sept 18, into Saturday:
| Time (BRT) | Match |
|---|---|
| Sep 18, 23:00 | Hikari 1-0 Azure |
| Sep 18, 23:30 | Dorado 1-0 Orikar |
| Sep 19, 00:00 | Ruby 1-0 Korean |
| Sep 19, 00:30 | Focus 1-0 Excelsius |
| Sep 19, 01:00 | Expert 1-0 Fire |
| Sep 19, 01:30 | BIood 1-0 Chile |
| Sep 19, 02:00 | Doom 1-0 Junkies |
| Sep 19, 02:30 | NDIS 1-0 Popcat |
The clan is registered as BIood, with a capital “i” in place of the “l”. That is the exact spelling in the platform’s record, not our typo.
Quarter-finals — Saturday night, Sept 19:
| Time (BRT) | Match |
|---|---|
| Sep 19, 23:00 | Dorado 1-0 Hikari |
| Sep 19, 23:30 | Focus 1-0 Ruby |
| Sep 20, 00:00 | Expert 1-0 BIood |
| Sep 20, 00:30 | NDIS 1-0 Doom |
Semi-finals, final and third place — early Sunday, Sept 20:
| Time (BRT) | Match |
|---|---|
| 01:00 | Focus 2-0 Dorado |
| 02:00 | Expert 2-0 NDIS |
| 03:00 | Expert 2-0 Focus — FINAL |
| 04:00 | NDIS v Dorado — not played |
Final standings: 1st Expert, 2nd Focus, 3rd NDIS, 4th Dorado.
The final was at 3am on a Sunday
That detail alone explains why almost nobody in Brazil followed it.
The whole tournament ran through the Brazilian small hours. The round of 16 started at 11pm on a Friday and went until nearly 3am. The final was at 3am on a Sunday. The official schedule was in PDT, US west coast time — four hours behind Brasília.
For a game whose Brazilian base is, as the Steam reviews show, among the most engaged it has, the schedule is an unintentional message about who the calendar was designed for.
The third-place match that never happened
The third-place match is recorded as NDIS 0-0 Dorado, with NDIS declared the winner.
What defines the match is the status on Dorado’s entry: 8. And that number has a documented meaning in the Triumph site’s own code, which loads a table translating {7: "walkover", 8: "give_up", 9: "forfeit"} and draws an exception icon when the status falls in that range.
In plain terms: Dorado gave up, and NDIS took third place without playing.
It is the only one of the tournament’s 32 participations that departs from normal status. There is no official explanation, and nothing links that withdrawal to any other event.
Twenty-two signed up. Sixteen got in
The event record says 22 participants for 16 slots. Six clans were left out: Poopoo, UnhappyEndings, GunzGoonz, 5Devils, Classic and Gamma.
The criterion announced on September 16 was this:
“Priority was given to teams that registered during the initial application period. The remaining spots were filled on a first-come, first-served basis from the extended registration period.”
That criterion does not explain at least three of the six exclusions. Poopoo holds the oldest registration of all 22 — the lowest identifier in the set. UnhappyEndings and GunzGoonz are the third and fourth oldest. All three were left out, while teams that registered later got in.
There is a possible explanation in the announcements themselves: the September 9 notice listed several disqualification conditions based on roster verification — non-existent clan, non-existent character, a player not in the clan by their first match. And the September 16 notice opens by saying “the final roster checks are complete”.
But the company never tied that check to any specific team, and the API endpoint listing participants requires authentication. So all that can be stated is this: six clans registered, did not make the bracket, and the published reason does not cover every case.
The Doom case: a request for transparency, unanswered
Early on September 21, hours after the final, player Kiujind opened a Steam forum thread titled “Public Statement Regarding the Doom Disqualification and defamation during tournament — Request for Evidence and Transparency.”
The text states, in his words:
“For context: Doom was invited to participate in a tournament organized by GM Mango and GM Bang. One of our players (Divinestone) was subsequently disqualified and publicly accused of hacking while streaming his POV, and clan got disqualified.”
And what the clan asks for:
“We have therefore opened a formal ticket requesting the evidence behind the accusation, including any clips, recordings, screenshots, logs, anti-cheat results, or other relevant material, as well as the criteria and procedures used to reach the decision.”
“We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for evidence, transparency, and a fair process.”
The author makes a point of separating the casters from the complaint, praising their work by name.
Now the caveats, and they matter.
This is a clan’s claim, not a fact we verified. The official platform records the match in which Doom went out — the quarter-final loss to NDIS — as a normal defeat, both sides at status 2, with none of the exception flags the system has for disqualification.
And the reach was small: the thread got exactly two replies, one agreeing and one mocking, none from a GM. It died the same day. This is one clan with one supporter, not a collective outcry.
What stands, and is verifiable: a public request for evidence, addressed to the tournament organisers, with no public answer to date.
What was promised as prizes
Per the official event description:
| Placement | Prize |
|---|---|
| 1st (Expert) | Exclusive icon + background + 100,000 ZC |
| 2nd (Focus) | Icon + background + 50,000 ZC |
| 3rd (NDIS) | Icon + background + 5,000 ZC |
| Participants | Exclusive event icon |
The ZC was to be split equally among the roster. No source, official or player, confirms the prizes were delivered. A promise is not delivery, and the acronym ZC still goes undefined in any official announcement — something we already flagged when the tournament was announced.
We also found no public record of how many of the 200 coupons promised during the broadcasts (100 per streamer) were redeemed. They expired on September 28. Searching the Steam forum for “coupon” returns zero results.
Why the Steam silence has a mechanical explanation
Before assuming bad faith, it is worth recording what the rulebook says. Item 3.5.5 is explicit:
“All official announcements will be delivered via Discord and Triumph.”
So: Steam was never the designated channel for the result. By the rule, the company did what it wrote.
The problem is practical, not contractual. Steam is where the game’s 48 official announcements live, where press and community sites pull information from, and where the player who does not join Discord is. The official site’s board, meanwhile, has not posted anything since August 31 — none of September’s outages, maintenances or patches was mirrored there.
The result: the first champion in the relaunch’s competitive history was crowned and most of the player base never found out.
Three things the record does not explain
To close, what we found and could not resolve:
The final is stamped at 2 minutes and 8 seconds between its scheduled time and its close. It was best-of-three, across two maps. The two possible readings are a result entered administratively, or a match played outside the recorded window — and neither is demonstrable with what we have. We record the data, not the conclusion.
Seven of the sixteen matches were closed with no end timestamp, with a declared winner and a blank time field.
One match has its close recorded the day before its scheduled time — Doom’s win over Junkies in the round of 16, with nearly 13 hours of difference. Matches running early explains the 10-to-46-minute cases we also found; it does not explain that one.
And Season 2?
There is no announcement. The next event on the platform (number 50) returns 404 — it does not exist.
The August 31 announcement said the Clan Battle “will continue to be held in the future”. So far, nothing.
Meanwhile, the competitive ranking that would give all of this meaning is still switched off: the League and Clan War tabs on the official ranking keep returning an error, as we note on our ranking page. For the game’s overall state — numbers, patches and what expires on October 6 — see this companion article.
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