GunZ in October: the player base fell 66%, the scores went up — and four events expire on Tuesday
Two weeks after our last update, GunZ enters October with a picture that does not fit in one sentence.
The player base keeps draining and has already lost two thirds of what it had in August. No official announcement has gone out in five and a half days. And four launch events expire next Tuesday, with nothing announced to replace them.
At the same time — and this complicates the easy reading — the people still playing are rating the game better than the lifetime score suggests, and the Brazilian audience is the most positive in the whole base.
Here are both sides.
The day the server went down three times
The period had one episode worth recording: September 20. Within fifteen hours, Masangsoft published four announcements.
| Time (UTC) | What went out |
|---|---|
| 03:58 | “Server Connection Issues (Resolved)” — describes temporary instability and says it was already resolved |
| 04:16 | “Connection Issue” — 18 minutes later, confirms a new access and connection problem, team investigating |
| 08:04 | Unscheduled 30-minute maintenance notice (08:15–08:45), reason “server stabilization” |
| 17:39 | “Server Issue” — server “momentarily inaccessible due to its unstable condition” |
Declared resolved, broke again eighteen minutes later, ran emergency maintenance overnight, and went down again in the afternoon.
There is a coincidence worth recording as a coincidence, not a cause: the clan tournament’s semi-finals and final were played exactly inside the window in which the company had an open connection problem — between the 04:16 notice and the 08:04 maintenance, no “resolved” was issued. We found not one player report saying the matches were affected, and nothing links the two. We covered the tournament in detail here.
On the forum, the reflex was immediate: “Sorta impossible to play a match now” appeared mid-morning, then “Server ta ruim?”, and at 17:39 — in the same minute as the official notice — the thread “Game is down?”.
What changed in the game
September 22 maintenance. Two content changes:
- The buff event went from “EXP & Bounty +20%” to “EXP +30%”. The number went up, but the Bounty bonus was removed — and Bounty is the currency you earn by playing, used to buy weapons. In practice: more experience, no help with money. Curiously, the change went unremarked on the forum: we searched for “bounty” and “buff” and there is not a single complaint or question about it.
- Outfit packages: SOF and Wayfarer added; Cleric sales extended; Sharkteeth and Fenrir discontinued, with individual items from both added.
September 21 patch:
- CBT profile items and Wishlist items extended from Sept 22 to October 6;
- “mitigated intermittent freezing issues on some clients”. Note the verb: mitigated, not fixed — and crash reports are still alive, with threads on Sept 29, Sept 30 and Oct 1. That does not contradict the announcement.
A live patch on September 22, with no downtime: fixed a game execution permissions issue. Anyone who did not update got a “Version Error” at the server selection screen.
Unscheduled maintenance on September 27, 15 minutes, “server stabilization”.
One detail that deserves credit: the September 26 notice listed times explicitly in BRT, alongside PDT and UTC. That is direct acknowledgement of the Brazilian audience.
After that, silence. No announcement since September 26, 15:08 UTC. That is over five and a half days as of publishing — and for scale, the game had just been through four maintenances in nine days.
One counter-check against the easy abandonment reading: the metadata on the Steam announcements kept being touched, including on October 1. Someone is still administering the page.
The numbers
Daily average of concurrent players, our own measurement from the public hourly series:
| Day | Average | Low | Peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 26 (Sat) | 489 | 408 | 582 |
| Sep 27 (Sun) | 481 | 377 | 538 |
| Sep 28 | 402 | 318 | 498 |
| Sep 29 | 382 | 300 | 514 |
| Sep 30 | 362 | 287 | 453 |
| Oct 1 | 353 | 292 | 460 |
It is not a single drop: it is five consecutive days of continuous decline, 28% below the previous weekend. Part of the Saturday and Sunday peak is the weekend effect every game has — but the slope across weekdays is consistent.
Pulling the line further back, from our own records: the daily average was 1,032 on August 23, 444 on September 18 and 353 on October 1. That is -66% in a little over five weeks. Against the all-time peak of 2,241, from launch week, today’s figure is -83%.
A note on method: Steam’s player endpoint is cached for around five minutes. Two consecutive reads are not two measurements.
In the ranking, two signals:
- there are 184,190 ranked accounts, but the rate of new entries has slowed by 39% — about 1,043 new accounts per day over the last two weeks, against 1,699/day in the previous period;
- the top has frozen. Luna is still level 87, the same as September 19, and the top ten show no change in position at all.
Now the other side: the scores improved
Here is the figure almost nobody reads correctly.
The game shows on Steam as “Mixed”, 47.5% positive (2,048 reviews). That looks bad. But that number is, largely, frozen damage from launch week.
Look at the curve week by week:
| Week | % positive |
|---|---|
| Aug 14 (launch) | 43.1% |
| Aug 21 | 54.7% |
| Aug 28 | 58.1% |
| Sep 4 | 46.7% |
| Sep 11 | 57.7% |
| Sep 18 | 52.9% |
| Sep 25 | 60.0% |
Launch week alone accounts for 68.8% of every review the game has ever received. Take it out and GunZ sits at 54.9% positive.
And in the recent windows: 63.3% positive over the last 7 days and 57% over the last 14. The 7-day figure has barely moved since our last measurement (62%) — meaning there was no deterioration in sentiment after the chaotic September 20, nor after the buff swap.
Brazil is the most positive audience
This is the most interesting cut for our readers.
Brazilian Portuguese is the second language in recent reviews, behind only English. And the score is a different story: over the last 14 days there were 13 Brazilian reviews, 11 positive — 84.6%, against 57% for the period’s overall average.
The negatives are not from people who played
The detail that completes the picture: among negative reviews in the last 7 days, the median playtime is 0.4 hours, and eight of eleven have under one hour. Among the positives, the median is 13.4 hours.
Translated: the people giving it a thumbs-down are, for the most part, people who could not play — stuck on the loading screen, unable to reach the server. People who get in and play tend to like it.
GunZ’s measurable problem today is not that the game disappoints. It is that people cannot get in, and those who do have no new content and no competitive reason to come back.
The forum is not in revolt. It is emptying
Volume has fallen to one to four new threads a day. The big threads have stopped growing.
Classifying the 45 threads across the first three pages: connection and server are the biggest block (15 threads, 33%), followed by cheaters (8), content and gameplay (8), crashes (6), monetisation (3) and support/bans (3).
Cheaters vanished from page one. On September 19 we counted 3 of 15 threads about hackers; now it is zero of 15 — the eight that exist sit on pages 2 and 3, with no new post for about five days.
That does not prove the problem was solved. Three competing explanations we cannot separate: the company banned the repeat offenders; players gave up complaining; or there are simply fewer people playing — and fewer people to run into cheaters and open threads.
Three things the forum shows that deserve recording:
There was a wave of bans in late September — player report, not an announcement. Two players pasted the reply they received from the operations team, justifying the ban by “abnormal gameplay” and by impact on the site ranking “based on kill and death statistics”. Note: the letter does not mention aimbot or client hacks — it talks about statistics. Masangsoft published nothing about bans.
The community built its own anti-cheat tool. A September 22 thread shares a site where you upload a .gzr replay file and it reconstructs the match in 3D from each player’s point of view, with a reliability index and a collective-judgement tab.
Broken monetisation is a persistent theme — and it is people trying to spend money and failing: billing system errors, credits bought with items not delivered, GunZ Plus subscribers not getting what they paid for.
And a structured, polite request from a player of the original Korean beta, asking for classic maps back, got zero replies — from players or staff. A thread with no reply is, in itself, a data point.
Promised and not delivered
| Promise | When | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Devs replying directly on forum and Discord | PD NOTE, Sep 11 | Zero replies from an official account in the threads we opened |
| A “Discord Town Hall” in preparation | PD NOTE, Sep 11 | No public record 21 days later* |
| League and Clan War ranking | — | Never switched on; the API errors on every variant |
| Tournament result and prizes | — | Result only on the platform; prize delivery unconfirmed |
| Tournament Season 2 | Aug 31 | Does not exist on the platform |
| Official site board | — | Last post on August 31 |
* The Town Hall was promised for Discord, which requires a login and is not indexable. We cannot claim it did not happen — only that there is no public record outside of it.
What expires on October 6
This is the actionable part, which is why it closes the article.
Four launch events end next Tuesday, October 6: the Launch Event, the Welcome Reward, the 200,000 Wishlist Milestone Reward and the Launch Celebration Attendance Event. The September 21 patch pushed the CBT profile items and Wishlist items to the same date.
Nothing has been announced to replace them. If you have a pending reward in any of those, claim it before Tuesday.
The Drops campaign, meanwhile, has already lapsed: the official page still shows as its only campaign the one that ran from August 13 to September 8, over three weeks finished, with no successor.
You can check the server’s live state on the status page and search any player by nickname in the ranking. If your game keeps closing by itself, the route is the crash and BugTrap guide — and if the complaint is visibility, the archetype guide.
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