GunZ has stabilised and hit 968 online — but the compensation announced is not for the crisis

Almost a week after the patch that broke matches, one thing can be said safely: GunZ is playable again.

The complaints stopped, Friday was the best day in four, and the reports coming in now are from people actually playing. But there are two things almost nobody is reading correctly — and one of them is the announcement that went around Discord this week.

First, what genuinely improved

The last post in any of the 14 crisis threads on the Steam forums is from Aug 26 at 12:51 UTC — and it is a celebration, not a complaint: “FINALLY I CAN PLAY”. Since then there have been more than 62 hours of total silence in those discussions. The forum sorts threads by last reply, so if any of them had received a post in the last 20 hours it would be on page one. None is.

The new reports point the other way. A Portuguese-language review posted on Friday evening, from a player with 50 hours in the game, says it runs with practically no lag. And a player who had depended on a VPN to get in came back to the forum to say he does not need it any more.

On our side, the status page logged zero community reports in the last half hour.

And the numbers

The player base recovered — partly, and less than it looks.

On Friday evening the game crossed 950 concurrents and hit 968, the highest mark in 94 hours. By the turn into Saturday it was back down to the 890–920 range.

The daily average of concurrent players tells the fuller story:

Day	Average	Peak
Aug 23 (Sun, pre-patch)	1,032	—
Aug 24 (Mon)	803	1,047
Aug 25 (Tue, patch + crisis)	786	979
Aug 26 (Wed)	704	839
Aug 27 (Thu)	729	869
Aug 28 (Fri)	754	857

So: Wednesday was rock bottom, and it has climbed since. But Friday’s average is still 4% below the day of the patch itself and 27% below the last pre-crisis Sunday.

Two honest caveats before anyone uses those numbers out of context:

Day of the week matters and cannot be separated out. The two reference days before the patch are a Saturday and a Sunday; a Friday naturally draws less. The seven-day window contains no pre-patch Thursday or Friday to compare against.
Friday’s peak (857) did not beat Tuesday’s (979) — and that 979 is misleading: it falls in the slot corresponding to Monday evening, meaning before the maintenance.

For scale: Friday evening’s 968 is 43% of the game’s all-time peak of 2,241, which has not been threatened since launch week.

On Steam reviews, the lifetime figure barely moves: 1,687 reviews, 45.7% positive, a “Mixed” rating — it was 1,632 and 45.3% on Wednesday. But the recent flow runs well above the lifetime number: the last 48 hours brought 40 reviews at 57.5% positive, and Friday alone hit 60.7%, the best day in the window. People arriving (or returning) now are enjoying it; the lifetime score climbs slowly because it carries the negative mass of launch week.

In the ranking, growth never stopped, not even during the crisis: 135,999 ranked accounts, against 125,702 on Tuesday — over 10,000 in four days. And the top jumped: Luna, now level 71 (was 63). A caveat is owed: that figure is cumulative since August 15, so it grows even on a day when the server is broken. It is not a recovery gauge.

The compensation: read it carefully

Early on Friday, at 06:28 UTC, a maintenance notice went out with two items — one of them unprecedented:

[Maintenance Details]

5-day additional compensation for GunZ Plus purchasers

Fixed an issue where GunZ Plus EXP and Bounty bonuses were not applying

— [Notice] Server Maintenance on Aug 28, 2026 (PDT), Steam

Maintenance ran from 07:00 to 08:00 UTC on Friday, one hour.

It is the first material compensation to appear in the game’s official Steam announcements. We swept all 26 announcements published since July 29: the word “compensation” appears exactly once, in that notice. “Refund” and “reimbursement” appear zero times.

But this is where the reading has to be surgical. The compensation is not for the connection crisis. The text ties the five days exclusively to the GunZ Plus bug, and the notice:

does not mention network, connection, ping, agent servers or the two days when nobody could play;
carries no apology — it does not use “apologize” or “inconvenience”, words the company itself had used in Wednesday’s notice;
gives nothing to anyone who did not buy. Players who lost two days and never paid for GunZ Plus got nothing at all.

If you saw the screenshot going around and read it as “Masangsoft is compensating for the crisis” — it is not.

What was broken in GunZ Plus

That is the second point that slipped past everyone.

GunZ Plus — the paid product that launched in the very maintenance that started the crisis — spent about four days failing to apply its EXP and Bounty bonuses, from Tuesday until Friday’s maintenance. That is not our accusation: it is what Masangsoft’s own notice fixes.

In practice, anyone who bought during that window paid for a benefit that was not working.

And one detail tightens the screw: the same patch that launched GunZ Plus ended the free 30% XP event, swapping it for a 30% BT one. Players grinding levels lost the free bonus on Tuesday — and the paid bonus that could have replaced it was not being applied.

The strangest part is that almost nobody complained publicly. We swept the first six pages of the Steam forum (90 threads) and ran eleven searches for terms like “gunz plus”, “exp”, “bounty” and “not applying”: zero threads dedicated to the bug. The only public complaint we found is a short Thursday post inside another thread — sixteen hours before the compensation was announced. Across the hundred most recent reviews, not one mentions the bug or the compensation.

So the company was not pressured by the forum. It found this on its own, or through support tickets. (We cannot speak for Discord — we did not check there.)

What Masangsoft never said

More than 64 hours after Wednesday’s notice about the Agent servers, it still carries no “(Resolved)” suffix in its title, and its edit record has been frozen since Aug 26 at 11:09 UTC. No new announcement in 21 hours. Nowhere in the official channel is there a sentence saying the failure was fixed.

Here we owe you a correction. In Wednesday’s article we said the signal to watch would be that notice gaining a “(Resolved)”. We went back through the history carefully and the tip is weaker than it looked: Masangsoft used that marker three times, all within a 21-hour window between August 14 and 15, and never again — including another “[Notice] Connection Issue”, the one from Aug 15, which also never got the suffix. The company dropped the practice eleven days before this crisis.

So the absence of “(Resolved)” proves only this: there was no public closure. It does not prove the company considers the case open.

What is still trickling in

Not everything went quiet.

The crisis symptom still showed up on Thursday. A review published Aug 27 at 18:52 UTC — 31 hours after the official notice — was still complaining about “ping 0”. And a Friday review, positive though it is, records “obvious connection issues”.
Crashes continue. New threads appeared between Thursday and Friday: HP and AP bars going black with a freeze, crashes in match and in replay, and a case of hanging on the “Waiting for other players…” screen after a match ends. Worth remembering that the Aug 24 patch literally promised “improved stability to reduce occasional unexpected game crashes”.
A cluster of ban reports appeared. Between Thursday and Friday, five different forum accounts reported being blocked with the message “Connection is denied due to user status”, with no explanation — and four more mentions show up in recent reviews, across four languages. That cluster did not exist on Wednesday. We have not investigated this yet, and we are not going to speculate about the cause: it is on record as something we are watching.
Two failures were fixed with no announcement at all: credit purchases were stuck from Tuesday to Friday (the player who opened the thread came back to say it started working), and three Steam achievements were frozen at 0%, of which only one started counting again.

Still unanswered

What GunZ Plus costs, and what exactly it grants. That is published nowhere outside the game client. The Steam listing marks the game as free, with no DLC and no packages, carrying only the generic “In-App Purchases” tag. On the official site, the shop URLs respond but return a disguised error page. The only GunZ Plus benefit confirmed by an official source is the one that broke: EXP and Bounty bonuses — and we only know that because the company fixed the failure.
The technical cause of the crisis. The only official text speaks of “Agent server updates to improve network stability, starting with Europe”. Nothing beyond that.
Whether the five-day compensation has actually been credited. No announcement, review or forum post mentions receiving it.

And a correction on our side

We took the chance to fix something here too. Our status page treated a maintenance notice as “scheduled” based on the date in its title rather than the real window written into the body of the announcement. The result: after Friday’s maintenance ended, the site kept announcing a maintenance that was already over.

The status now reads the UTC window inside the notice itself. A maintenance that has ended is history, not an alert.

One-line summary: the game is working again and climbing, Masangsoft never said it fixed anything, and the five days of compensation go to GunZ Plus buyers — because of a bonus that was not being applied, not because of the two days of broken servers.

You can follow the server’s live state on the status page, which also shows what the community is reporting right now.