Misdoubtful wrote:Is this actually all over a bee emoji?
Lmao people need to get a grip if it is it's a bee emoji it's not even a big deal????
The reasons are naturally more complex than the weird fanfic that's being painted here.
It started some time ago, MSO started being more active on development after years of inactivity.
He found a lot of things changed during his absence, and there was a different contribution culture from when he directed development long ago.
In particular, he had/has a hard time conciliating views with the newer maintainers, who brought a lot of changes in standards and procedures into the codebase.
I assume there have been other factors as well, as MSO has butted heads several times with several maintainers, and we got a few unkind words from him, me included though I wasn't actually the author of what he was complaining about.
Many small things that by themselves are not worth much ended up getting on his nerves, and that exploded in parts in two moments.
First was the slips one: there was a bug that made some turfs perma-slippery and he asked on how to fix it live. A maintainer gave him the wrong proc for him to call with SDQL and he permanently broke it for the round, generating a lot of hanging references. That made him very mad, chiefly at the obscurity of admin tools, the lack of support for live-debugging, and things having grown to a complexity in which it wasn't as trivial as before to fix things on the go.
His reaction was to force the test merge of the removal of all slips, declaring there would be no more slipping until admin tools to grant similar control of the game as a few years ago were made. The size of that request is difficult to explain if you don't know the code, but suffice it to say that's far from trivial.
Things were not on good standing by then, he had publicly declared his lack of trust on the team and made it clear he didn't think of us very much (of me and all maintainers who joined the team after he said to lack the critical thinking skills necessary to do the job), so when Timber closed a PR for poor reasons he exploded a bit more violently again, abused his commit access to instantly self-merge a change in the contribution guidelines and declared himself above the headcoders.
The headcoders naturally removed his commit access for its abuse, and the dev team in general, already tired of his rudeness, did not seem inclined to accept this proposed new arrangement.
Spirits rose, threats were made, and as is usual things calmed down.
The aftermath of this is that fewer people have access to the servers now, only a few trusted keyholders. Some maintainer-keyholders lost that privilege.
What does this mean, how does this impact people?
Very little, it changes almost nothing.
A few people who contributed with their spare time so that players wouldn't get disconnected during crashes, to fix things in a more timely manner and to generally maintain the servers lost their access.
The ones who retained it will have a bit more work on their hands, and things might be a little bit slower.
But the game carries on.