Communication
Announcements
Everything you need to know before it affects you. Every post here goes into the Discord at the same moment, from the same source — there is no version of an announcement that exists in one place and not the other.
Everything has moved to the live server, and it is up 24/7
The move is done. Accounts, characters, ratings, clans and match history all came across untouched, so you log in to what you had.
The opening hours are gone with it. There is no 09:30 and no 01:00. The server is up, and if it is ever down that is a fault, not a schedule. The shutdown announced for Tuesday is cancelled. Nothing goes off.
Prime time stays at 20:00 to 23:00 CET, with ladder nights Wednesday and Sunday at 20:00. That was never about when the server was on. It is about everyone being in the same lobby at the same time, which counts for more now the rest of the day is open.
The server is also on the patch open beta will launch on, rather than holding it back.
There is a profile screen. Your character, your record, your rank, a season-by-season history, and every ranked match you have played, each one opening into its full scoreboard. Your profile carries an icon and a banner you choose: thirty-one icons and twenty-one banners, all earned by playing. Six for the maps you play most at 100 rounds each, four for matches played, and the rest tied to kills, K-style techniques and your clan. Every locked one shows a bar and the exact figure, so you can see how far off you are.
Rest the cursor on anyone in the lobby, the room list or the scoreboard and you get their banner, icon and rank frame. Right-click to reach their profile.
Other players are now drawn where they actually were, instead of where the game guessed they were going. A player changing direction used to be drawn up to two thirds of a body away from where you had to aim, which is why standing targets always felt fine and moving ones did not. Your own movement, dashing and cancels are untouched. Ping is one number now, the round trip to the server, measured the same way for every row on the scoreboard, and there is a shot accuracy readout under your health bar while you play.
Dying works properly again: the wait, the prompt, and a real spawn point instead of dropping you back where you fell.
The shop is open, and for the beta everything in it is free. Three sets — Fenrir Emberforge, Void Crow and Crimson Xian, each bringing its own profile portrait — and two blade effects, Ember and Arc. Take them and tell me what you think of the effects in particular; they are the part I am least sure of, and the price is zero precisely so that what comes back is about how they look rather than how long they took to earn.
Replays are fixed in place. Anything you record from this patch onwards keeps working through future updates. Replays recorded before it cannot be read and are now refused with a message rather than crashing the client. Time played is recorded from now on; it never was before. Offensive character and clan names are refused on the server, so it applies to everyone.
Your launcher pulls it on next start. If it has been a while, let it finish before you log in.
The servers go offline Tuesday, and stay off until I'm back
Both servers run as normal through the weekend and Monday. They shut down on Tuesday at 01:00 CET, at the usual closing time, and they do not come back up that morning.
I am away on holiday for the week. The machine the servers run on sits in my house and is switched off while I am gone, so there is no version of this where something stays online. Nothing has broken and nothing is cancelled.
If you want a last session before it goes quiet, Monday evening is it — prime time is 20:00 to 23:00 CET as always, and the server closes at 01:00.
The moment the servers are back up, it is posted here and in the Discord. Everything built while I am away lands in the same week.
Prime time is 20:00–23:00 CET, every day
There is now one hour to turn up. Every day, 20:00 to 23:00 CET, and Wednesday and Sunday at 20:00 are the ladder nights — the slots with the deepest queue and the ones the tournaments run in.
The reason is arithmetic, not ceremony. Twenty-five players spread across a day is an empty lobby every time you look. The same twenty-five at 20:00 is a full room, a clan war queue that actually pops, and a reason to come back tomorrow. Every GunZ server in existence is short of the second thing and not the first.
Both nights are in the Discord as recurring events, so you can hit Interested once and let Discord remind you rather than remembering on your own. The rest of the day is not dead — the 24/7 rooms are always running and the server is up from 09:30 to 01:00 CET — but if you only play one session, play it at eight.
Profile pages are live — every season, every match
Every character now has a page on the website. It shows the rank you reached in each season with your record and win rate, your MMR over time, the weapons you actually kill with, the maps you play best on, the hours you play, and your last twenty matches — filtered by Clan War, Duel, Casual or Quest, because your duel form and your clan war form are two different questions.
Click a season to change everything on the left to that season. Seasons no longer wipe the slate either: your peak rank and a top-five finish are yours to keep, and they show in the game beside your name.
To see yours: go to playapextheduel.com/ladder and click any name — yours included.
The same page is coming inside the client, so you will be able to look someone up without leaving the game.
The duel ladder is open — 1v1, rated, queue on your own
Walk into the Ladder channel, press FIND A DUEL, and you are in a rated 1v1 without rounding up a clan first. The rating you earn there is your character's own — it is not your clan's, and nothing you do in a duel moves your clan's standing.
Rankings are one button from the panel, on both the APEX and the Classic interface — the Classic ladder screen was rebuilt for this and now has a character render in the lobby for the first time. Season rewards are shown on the panel rather than named.
Update through the launcher before you play. Client and server changed together this time, so an old client cannot join.
The website has accounts now, and signing in is one click
playapextheduel.com/account is live. It shows your characters, their rank and MMR, their Clan War record, their duel K/D and their Quest record, plus your clan and everyone in it. There is no new password to invent, and none to forget.
If you are already playing, here is the whole of it. Open playapextheduel.com/account and press Sign in with Discord. Approve it, and you are back on the page. Then type the username and password you use on the game's login screen, once, so we know which account in the game is yours. That is it, and you will not be asked again on that browser.
The password you type is checked against the game server itself and is not stored on the website. APEX reads your Discord name and avatar and nothing else: it cannot post, read your messages, or see what servers you are in.
One catch worth knowing. That linking step, and only that step, needs the game server to be awake, because that is the machine holding the passwords. If you try it while the server is off, the page will say so and you can come back in the morning. Everything else on the site works whether the server is up or not.
Clan leaders get a little more. You can upload your clan's emblem from the account page and it appears in the lobby, on the clan board and on the in-match scoreboard. A square PNG between 16 and 256 pixels, under 256 KB. Players already in the game pick it up within a couple of hours, or immediately after the next restart.
Leaders can also promote, demote and remove members from the same page, and clan administrators can remove ordinary members. The website does not change the clan itself, it asks the game server to, so the change and the roster the lobby is showing can never disagree. In practice that takes a second or two.
Ladder nights: Wednesday and Sunday, 20:00 CET
There are two fixed times a week from now on: Wednesday and Sunday, 20:00 CET. The first one is Sunday 30 August. Nothing to sign up for and no bracket to enter.
A rated ladder needs somebody else in the queue at the same moment you are. A dozen people spread across a fifteen-hour window means everyone logs in, finds an empty lobby and logs out again, which is roughly what has been happening.
It does not matter much what gets played. Clan war, duels, quest, or standing around in a room. What made ijji worth logging into was that other people were already there, and that is the whole point of picking a time.
20:00 CET is 19:00 in the UK, 15:00 in Brasília and 14:00 US Eastern.
Four people turning up is still a better evening than four people logging in at four separate times. If those times are wrong for where you are, say so in #general. The server closes at 01:00 CET, which is early if you are in Brazil or North America, and I would rather move the night than keep it convenient for me.
I will be on for both.
Quest is live — expect bugs, and report them
The quest update is out. Open the launcher and it will patch you; if you are on the old download, grab the new zip from #beta-download. Both servers were restarted for it, so if you were playing when it went out, that is why you were dropped.
What is in it: quests now pay experience worth the time they take, quest curiosities buy a Curiosity Box instead of being sold for bounty, eleven boss weapons exist as real drops for the first time, there are leaderboards for fastest clears, and the damage counter that always read zero is fixed. The full list is on the patch notes page.
This is a lot of new code in one go, and it has had one afternoon of testing. Expect rough edges and please report them in #bug-reports — what you were doing, what you expected, what happened. A report with the run and the difficulty in it is worth ten that say it did not work.
Four things worth knowing before you report them as bugs. Boss trophy weapons are rare on purpose: roughly one boss kill in twenty, and a boss only appears once its two-item recipe is on the altar, so several runs with nothing is the intended feel rather than something broken. Anything to do with a seven-day rental is brand new — every quest drop before today quietly became permanent once you logged out — so if a rented item shows the wrong time left, or disappears when it should not have, that one is worth reporting. A Torn Page's level requirement is on whoever puts the page up, not on the room: a level 13 player offers the level 13 page and anyone can join at any level, so tell us if it refuses the person holding it or lets a lower tier open. And quest curiosities are worth keeping now — there is no sell button for them any more, so if you find somewhere that still sells one, that is a bug.
Nothing on that list can hurt a character. The worst case anywhere in this update is a drop that does not arrive or a line that does not draw, so it is safe to go and break it.
The launcher is here, and everyone needs to re-download once
The client now has a launcher, and that changes how updates reach you. Download the new zip from #beta-download, unzip it, and run launcher.exe instead of Gunz.exe. It checks for updates, fetches only the parts of files that actually changed, and then starts the game.
This one re-download is not optional. The old zip has no launcher in it and its client is now out of date, so the server will refuse it at login. Grab the new one and you are current.
It is also the last full download you will need. From here a fix that goes out in the afternoon reaches you in seconds rather than as another 268 MB, which until today is the reason fixes sat around waiting for the next session instead of being in your hands the same day.
The server hours have widened at the same time: 09:30 to 01:00 CET, every day, instead of 18:00 to 01:00. That is about eight more hours a day. Open the launcher outside those hours and it will tell you the server is closed rather than showing you an error.
One habit worth forming: start from launcher.exe every time. Starting Gunz.exe directly skips the update check, and a client the server does not recognise is refused at login.
The server is live
The closed beta is open. The server is up now, and from here it runs 18:00 to 01:00 CET every day.
If you already have a key: the download is in #beta-download. Unzip it, run Gunz.exe, hit Register on the login screen and paste your key in. If you don't have one there are still keys left, so ask in #beta-signup and one gets sent to you within seconds.
Clan war is queueable at 1v1 for the beta, so you can try the ladder without rounding up three teammates first. It's the same rating either way.
What's worth reporting: anything that desyncs, rubber-bands, or eats a hit that clearly landed. Those are the ones this test exists to catch. Put them in #bug-reports and say what you were doing when it happened.
Invite people to the Discord, get paid in coins
Bring people in and you get credited for it. Use your own invite link — right-click the server, Invite People, and the link Discord gives you is yours. A shared link credits whoever made it, so if you use someone else's, they get the invite and you get nothing.
Five people gets you the Recruiter role and 300 coins. Ten is 700, twenty is 1,500 and the Herald role, fifty is 4,000 and Kingmaker. Those are totals, not steps: reaching ten tops you up to 700 rather than adding 700. Type !invites in #general to see where you are.
An invite counts once the person you brought has been in the server five days and is still in it, and Discord accounts made in the last week never count. That is not distrust of you, it is what stops the whole thing being farmed with throwaway accounts in an afternoon. Nothing is lost by inviting early — the clock starts the moment they join.
Coins are the cash shop currency and they buy cosmetics. They do not buy stats, and they never will. You earn them by playing as well, so this is a head start on the same currency rather than a separate one.
If you do not have a game account yet, your coins wait for you. The balance is kept against your Discord account and paid across once you redeem a key, so inviting people before you get in costs you nothing.
One honest limitation: the bot only sees joins while it is running. If it is down when someone arrives, that invite is credited to nobody and I cannot repair it afterwards — Discord will not say who invited an existing member. If your count looks wrong, say so in #support and I will sort it by hand.
The closed beta is open, and it is 20 people
Round one starts now and there are 20 seats. Ask in #beta-signup in the Discord. One message is enough, there's no form to fill in and nothing to apply for. The first 20 people get the Beta Tester role, which makes the download channel visible, and an invite key by DM.
A key works for exactly one account, so the keys are the cap. When they run out the round is full, and I'll announce the next one here.
The client is a zip. 267 MB, Windows only. Unzip it and run Gunz.exe. There's no launcher and no installer during the beta: the auto-updater isn't finished, and a launcher that refuses to run is worse than none at all. Windows SmartScreen will warn you once, because the executable isn't signed.
The server runs 18:00 to 01:00 CET, every day. Outside those hours it's off rather than broken.
First session is Sunday 23 August at 18:00 CET. Install before then if you can, so the first hour goes on playing instead of unzipping.
Worth reporting: anything that desyncs, rubber-bands, or eats a hit that clearly landed. That's what a closed beta is for.
APEX needs an artist and a video editor
Two things are holding this back and neither of them is code. The first is art. Cosmetic sets, rank crests, room banners, interface pieces: almost everything you can see in the game right now was either generated by a Python script or is 2006 artwork, and both show.
The second is video. There is footage of the movement system sitting on a drive with nobody to cut it.
This is unpaid. It is a private server with no income, and pretending otherwise would waste your time and mine. What there is: credit, a Developer role, and work that players actually see. If the cosmetic shop earns anything, that changes, and I will be the one to raise it.
Reply in the #recruitment channel in the Discord with something you have made. It does not need to be GunZ, or a game at all.
The beta client is not downloadable for now
The 0.9.4 archive has been taken off the site. It is a stale build, and the first thing someone sees after finding this server should not be a version several days behind what is actually running.
Nothing has gone wrong, and this is not a delay notice in disguise. The client is worked on every day and what lands is on the patch notes page the same day it lands — the list is longer this week than it was last week.
When there is a build worth handing out it goes out through the Discord, and the post appears here at the same moment. There is no list to join and nothing to chase.
Every change is posted here and in Discord, at the same time
Patch notes and announcements are now published from one source. The moment something appears on the website it is posted into the Discord as well, in full, with the same wording and the same date.
This is not a feature; it is the minimum. Finding out that your game changed by logging in and noticing is how a server loses the people who cared enough to keep playing it, and it is the single most common complaint about how GunZ has been run.
There is no separate insider channel and no information that reaches a subset of players first. If it is not on this page or in the patch notes, it has not happened yet.
The closed beta client is downloadable
The client is a plain zip and it is served directly from the play page. There is no launcher and no installer yet: unzip it, run Gunz.exe, and register in the client.
Access is invite-gated during the closed beta. Invites are handed out in the Discord.
The download is one mirror, hosted on the same machine that serves this site. A second mirror waits on there being a second machine, because two copies on one host fail at the same moment.
Day-to-day changes are not announcements. Those are on the patch notes page, and they also go to Discord.