Clan War, MVP and Lizardman: what GunZ gained in three weeks — and what got worse

It has been almost three weeks since our last update, and GunZ has not stood still. Twelve official announcements in 19 days: three maintenances, four patches, the clan tournament coming to life and a shift in how the production team communicates.

They were also three weeks in which the concurrent player count fell by almost half and the forum changed subject — from broken servers to cheaters.

Here is what happened.

Clan War finally opened

This is the headline. In the maintenance in the early hours of September 15 (06:00 to 08:00 UTC):

the Clan War preseason began, with its own lobby inside the game;
the League preseason ended, having opened on September 1.

Masangsoft set no deadline: the announcement says the Clan War preseason stays active “until further notice”.

One practical caveat: we checked just now and the official ranking still does not expose the League or Clan War tabs — both still return an error. That is why on our ranking page they remain marked “soon”. The day they switch on, they will show up there automatically.

And a problem has already surfaced: on September 16 the company published a “Known Issue” acknowledging that some Clan War records are not displaying correctly under certain circumstances. As of publishing, no fix had been announced.

The clan tournament: 16 teams and a Twitch broadcast

The Clan Battle Tournament Season 1, which we covered when registration opened, had a bumpy road to its bracket.

On September 9, the organisers reported that 18 teams had applied — and that reviewing the list turned up enough problems to warrant an entire announcement of additional rules:

any clan that did not exist in-game on the date of the notice would be excluded;
non-existent characters would be removed from the roster — and if that dropped a team below the minimum, the whole team could be disqualified;
only players on the entry play: unregistered substitutes are strictly prohibited;
the edit deadline was extended to September 15, 00:00 UTC — but only to fix existing applications, with no new clans accepted.

And the most concrete adjustment: with 16 teams or fewer, the Round of 32 was cancelled. The tournament starts straight at the Round of 16.

On September 16 the official bracket went up on Triumph, at tp.masanggames.com/event/49/bracket. Final format: 16 teams, with priority given to those who registered in the original window — the remaining spots went first-come, first-served during the extension, exactly as the rulebook said.

There will be a broadcast. Two creators were announced as official casters: Apple33 (twitch.tv/apple33live) and haullz (twitch.tv/haullz).

And there are rewards for watching: each streamer reveals a coupon code during their stream, redeemable by the first 100 players each — 200 in total. Limit of one per account, and the codes expire on September 28 at 00:00 PDT, or earlier if the 100-redemption cap is hit.

We could not read the bracket: the Triumph page is a JavaScript application and does not serve its content for automated reading. Anyone wanting to see the matchups needs to open the link in a browser.

New content: Lizardman and the MVP system

The September 8 maintenance — which, incidentally, was extended from 2 to 3 hours for “additional work” — brought the period’s two content additions:

Lizardman in Quest Mode. Not just a monster: the patch lists a new map, new monsters and associated drop equipment.

MVP system. An MVP screen now appears at the end of a match in every mode except Quest.

Alongside came clan mark improvements — it now shows in the waiting room, a display error on the result screen was fixed, and its size was adjusted both there and in the social window.

The fix that matters to K-Style players

Buried in the September 7 patch list, one line that is easy to miss but deserves attention:

“Improved an issue where key inputs were occasionally not registered correctly.”

For a game whose whole identity is a sequence of commands in exact order and timing, a key that does not register is the problem. If you had been blaming your own hands for the butterfly that would not come out, this may have been it.

The September 14 patch also touched:

stuttering on certain clients;
map fixes on Mansion, Town, Station, Castle, Island and Dungeon;
the latency graph and colour indicators by region, which were not reflecting the correct values;
social chat scrolling, which lost its position when a new message arrived.

And the unscheduled maintenance on September 18 (10:00 to 11:00 UTC) fixed two things that had been grating:

replay files that would not play;
the login queue getting stuck at position 1 — the classic of sitting forever as “next in line”.

It also extended the Attendance Check and Immortal events, due to end on September 22, to October 6.

Anti-cheat tightened — and the forum turned to cheaters

Two clear moves in the period.

On September 7, the patch brought: “Improved detection and countermeasures against unauthorized programs.” On September 14, a revealing fix: “Fixed an issue where the game did not automatically close after an unauthorized program detection message was displayed.” In other words — the game was detecting, warning, and then letting the person carry on.

On September 18 came the in-game report button, in the ESC menu.

Then the anticlimax: the day after the button shipped, the company published a “Known Issue” acknowledging that the report function is not working properly for some users.

The forum explains the urgency. Of the fifteen most recent threads on the Steam discussion board at the time of this report, three are cheater reports — with all-caps titles asking whether any administration exists at all. The dominant subject has changed: three weeks ago it was connectivity; now it is cheating, infinite loading screens and the “Authentication Failed E-0005” error.

The production team changed its posture

On September 11, producer PD Max published an announcement purely about communication — the “[PD NOTE] ATTENTION MERCENARIES!”.

The admission is direct:

“I realize we haven’t done a good enough job explaining where your feedback stands in our pipeline or how it’s being handled. This lack of transparency likely left you frustrated, making it hard to tell if the reports you took the time to write were even being read.”

What changes in practice: the development team will now reply directly in the Discord bug report channels and on the forum, rather than only reviewing internally. The announcement says this has already started, and that priority goes to issues affecting the wider player base.

And there is an announcement in the footer worth watching: the company is preparing a Discord Town Hall, with details to come.

One practical request they make, which raises the odds of your report becoming a fix: send specific conditions, reproduction steps, screenshots or video.

The numbers: the base halved

Here is the uncomfortable part.

Daily average of concurrent players, from the historical series:

Day	Average	Peak
Sep 12	606	633
Sep 13	602	687
Sep 14	459	565
Sep 15	482	563
Sep 16	471	560
Sep 17	451	512
Sep 18	444	540

The drop is concentrated: between September 13 and 14 the average fell 24% and never recovered. Worth noting that September 14 was the day of a connection incident — the company posted at 17:02 UTC that it had identified access failures around 16:45 UTC and was rebooting the server, an operation of roughly 30 minutes.

We cannot claim one caused the other. But the coincidence of dates is on the record.

Pull the line back further and the picture sharpens. On August 23, before the patch that started the crisis we covered, the daily average was 1,032 players. Yesterday it was 444. That is a 57% drop in under a month. At the time of publishing there are 424 concurrent players, with a 568 peak over the last 24 hours — against an all-time peak of 2,241, untouched since launch week.

But the people who stayed like it more

And here comes the contrast that complicates the easy reading.

On Steam the game holds 1,979 reviews at 47.3% positive — a “Mixed” rating. But the recent flow runs well above that lifetime figure:

last 14 days: 100 reviews, 59% positive;
last 7 days: 63 reviews, 62% positive.

So: fewer people playing, and the people playing rate it better. The lifetime score climbs slowly because it still carries the negative mass of launch week.

The ranking has not stopped growing either: 171,676 ranked accounts, against 135,999 at the end of August — over 35,000 in three weeks. And the top has shot up: Luna, now level 87 (was 71). The usual caveat applies: that number is cumulative, so it rises even on a bad day. It is not a gauge of how many people are online.

Details that only show up close

Two things we found while sweeping the announcements:

The September 14 patch was published twice. Two posts with the same title, eleven minutes apart — and the second version is shorter than the first: gone from it are the items about social chat scrolling, the unauthorized-program detection message and the loading screen overlap. There is no official explanation for the republication, and no way to tell which list is definitive.

The September 8 maintenance was extended at the last minute. The notice as published already carried the correction: from 2 hours to 3, “due to additional work”.

Still open

Clan War records not displaying correctly (acknowledged Sept 16, no fix announced).
The report button not working for some users (acknowledged Sept 18, one day after launch).
The Discord Town Hall date, still unannounced.
Tournament results — the bracket is on Triumph, but the page does not allow automated reading.

You can follow the server’s live state on the status page, and search any player by nickname in the ranking. And if your game keeps closing by itself, the route is still the crash and BugTrap guide.