Game Updates Featured

RIVALS Update 23: Free Weapons Week, New Codes & Wildcat Buff

RIVALS Update 23 makes every weapon free for 7 days, adds the back2back and nosniygamesontop codes, buffs the Wildcat and reverts the ELO changes.

Brandon Sorensen

Editor, BloxGuidesGG · Verified against the RIVALS Fandom wiki on September 15, 2026

Published: September 23, 2026•7 min read

#rivals update 23#rivals free weapons#rivals all weapons free#rivals back2back code#rivals nosniygamesontop code#rivals codes#rivals codes september 2026#rivals ria26#rivals roblox innovation awards 2026#rivals best shooter charm#rivals wildcat buff#rivals wildcat#rivals gate map#rivals elo revert#rivals ranked elo#rivals

Get update guides like this in your inbox

Roblox event guides and code drops. We email when there's something worth sending. Unsubscribe anytime.

Every weapon in RIVALS is free to use in any duel until roughly September 25. That includes Distortion at 700 keys, Warper at 650 and Permafrost at 600. The 42 weapons with a key price add up to 7,635 keys, and for a few more days you can play all of them before spending a single one.

Update 23 landed on September 18, 2026, the day RIVALS won two Roblox Innovation Awards: Best Shooter Experience for the second year running, and Best Studio for Nosniy Games. The free weapons are how they're celebrating. Two new codes, a Wildcat buff and a Ranked rollback came with it.

Codes: Two New Award Codes

Code	Reward	Status
back2back	RIA26 Best Shooter charm	Active, limited time
nosniygamesontop	RIA26 Best Studio emote	Active, limited time
FREE199	3 Keys	Active (current likes milestone)
COMMUNITY26	1 Community Wrap (random weapon)	Active
ROBLOX_RTC	5 Keys	Active
BONUS	1 Key	Active
BOOST	1 Key	Active

The devs called both award codes limited time and gave no expiry date, so redeem them now. Last year's award code, BESTSHOOTERGAME, is already on the wiki's expired list.

One catch trips people up: RIVALS codes only redeem if you follow @Nosniy or @SenseiWarrior on Roblox at the time. If a code says it failed, check that first.

FREE199 and COMMUNITY26 replaced FREE198 and COMMUNITY25 on September 20 and 19. The milestone code moves up by one every 50,000 likes, so it will change again. Our RIVALS codes page tracks the current one.

Free Weapons Week: What to Test

The patch notes give it 7 days: every weapon free in any duel. Counted from the September 18 update, that runs out around September 25. No exact hour was given, so don't leave it to the last evening.

Spend the week on the expensive stuff. The Standard weapons cost 5 to 75 keys each. Prime and Contraband are where a bad purchase actually hurts:

Weapon	Type	Slot	Key price
Distortion	Contraband	Primary	700
Warper	Contraband	Secondary	650
Permafrost	Contraband	Primary	600
Maul	Prime	Melee	550
Paintball Gun	Prime	Primary	475
Minigun	Prime	Primary	450
Energy Rifle	Prime	Primary	425
Grenade Launcher	Prime	Primary	425
Flamethrower	Prime	Primary	400
Energy Pistols	Prime	Secondary	400
Warpstone	Prime	Utility	400
Exogun	Prime	Secondary	350
Slingshot	Prime	Secondary	300
Medkit	Prime	Utility	300

Prime and Contraband weapons alone come to 6,875 keys of the 7,635 total. The Standard weapons with a key price come to 760.

Pick one weapon per slot you're thinking of buying and play at least a dozen duels with it. Two rounds won't tell you whether you like it.
Try the Contraband three first. Distortion, Warper and Permafrost are 1,950 keys between them, and they are the three priciest weapons in the game.
Write down your pick before the week ends. Once everything locks again, you'll be paying full price to find out.

For where each weapon sits against the others, see our RIVALS weapon tier list, and the weapons database has the stat lines.

Wildcat Buff, With the Math

The devs were blunt about why: the Wildcat "did not perform as well as expected on release." It came out two weeks earlier in Update 22 as the first new Standard weapon in a long while, with the game's first realistic recoil.

Stat	Before	After	Change
Damage	9	10	+11%
Critical damage	12	13	+8%
Magazine	24	30	+25%
Reserve ammo	96	120	+25%
Damage dropoff start	30 studs	40 studs	+10 studs
Damage dropoff end	90 studs	100 studs	+10 studs

The magazine change matters more than the damage bump. One full magazine of body shots used to be 24 × 9 = 216 damage. Now it's 30 × 10 = 300, a 39% increase before you reload.

That compounds with the Wildcat's jungle-style reload. The first reload is quick at 0.78 seconds, the second is 1.56. A bigger magazine means you hit that slow second reload less often in a fight.

With a 0.06-second fire cooldown, the Wildcat empties a full magazine in about 1.8 seconds, and point-blank body-shot DPS goes from 150 to roughly 167.

At 35 keys it's a small purchase next to the Prime primaries. And it's free this week anyway, so give the buffed version a go before you write it off on its launch reputation.

Ranked: The ELO Changes Are Reverted

Update 22 rewrote how Ranked ELO works:

Players above 3,600 ELO were no longer treated as equals, so a 10,000 ELO Archnemesis could get almost nothing for beating a 5,000 ELO Nemesis.
A win in a lopsided match could pay +0 ELO, with a new Stomp charm handed out as consolation.

Update 23 reverts those ELO changes. The devs admitted that changing it in the middle of a season was the wrong call, and said the changes will come back when the next season starts with everyone on a fresh slate.

The revert note only mentions ELO. Update 22's other Ranked changes, stricter Roblox account verification and region-locked matchmaking, aren't in the revert.

If you stopped playing Ranked because high-ELO wins were paying nothing, that problem is gone until next season.

Gate Map and Everything Else

Gate is a new Experimental map, available in 1v1 and 2v2. It showed up briefly in development footage during the Roblox Innovation Awards livestream, and the devs released it early because of that. The wiki lists it as Easy difficulty, built by @ShadowTrojan.

The rest of the patch:

Subspace Tripmine can no longer be used in Arcade Servers.
Last year's charm is renamed from RIA25 Award to RIA25 Best Shooter.
Energy Rifle's tracer beam effect can now take wraps.
Fixed Bonus Tasks staying stuck as completed when you had done none that day.
Fixed a Warper glitch that let players get out of the Onyx map.
Reload animation touch-ups for the Wildcat and the Light Fifty skin, plus icon tweaks for Plasma Wildcat and the Enerkey skins.

The origin story in the patch notes

Buried in the award notes: RIVALS started life as a zombie PvE game. SenseiWarrior built the FPS framework in December 2022 after playing a remaster of the classic Roblox game Zombie Tower.

The team spent all of 2023 on that zombie version, then switched to duels because PvE would have needed constant weekly updates to stay fresh.

FAQ

What are the new RIVALS codes in Update 23?

back2back gives the RIA26 Best Shooter charm and nosniygamesontop gives the RIA26 Best Studio emote. Both are limited time. FREE199 (3 keys) and COMMUNITY26 (a Community Wrap) are also active.

Are all weapons free in RIVALS right now?

Yes. Update 23 made every weapon free to use in any duel for 7 days from September 18, so the window closes around September 25.

Why is my RIVALS code not working?

You have to follow @Nosniy or @SenseiWarrior on Roblox to redeem codes. If you do and it still fails, the code has likely expired.

Did the Wildcat get buffed?

Yes. Damage went from 9 to 10, critical damage from 12 to 13, the magazine from 24 to 30, reserve ammo from 96 to 120, and damage dropoff now starts at 40 studs instead of 30.