Offender’s CKEY: qwerty
Date (MM-DD-YYYY): 09-29-2020
Rules Broken (if relevant): Maintainer rules
Incident Description:
Late last night qwerty opened and self-merged a felinid removal PR to the surprise of many. Similarly to the failed monkeyman/felinid removal vote, it prevents most people from choosing to be a felinid (although technically they’re not removed from the game entirely we all know this is still a felinid removal).
This PR violated maintainer standards and created a massively negative precedent simply for the way it was conducted, and as such qwerty should lose his maintainer role for the misconduct. The misconduct is as follows:
1) qwerty self-merged his own PR
This alone is a violation of maintainer rules. You cannot merge your own PRs, full stop. This would otherwise set a precedent that any one maintainer can do the same and have complete individual control over the codebase with no checks or balances.
2) Race-related changes require prior maintainer approval
I haven’t seen any evidence that this PR was approved by a different maintainer prior to it being opened. When I tried to make my own race-related PR a few days ago I had to get explicit approval for each aspect of change in the PR before it would be allowed, and this approval is visible in the #developer channel. It’s possible that timestamped evidence with informed consent of exactly what the PR would be about exists however but this is not publicly available.
3) He violated the grace period between each felinid removal vote
The previous votes have had at least 3 months waiting period between them because of the amount of controversy they generate, with Golden vs Sage players being given yet another reason to be at each others’ throats. The last vote was only a few days ago, there is no reason there should be yet another vote now.
4) He opened the PR late night and merged it in a few hours when the previous votes each lasted several days
This is clearly a highly controversial topic as proven by the multi-day felinid removal vote which garnered over 200 votes several days ago. This PR however was opened late night (~2AM GMT) and then merged within 4 hours. There’s obviously very few people who have thus even seen the PR before it was merged, which should have been the case when it’s such a controversial feature removal.
5) It creates the precedent of premium gameplay features in a F2P open-source game, where virtually all the pre-existing content come from other contributors
This isn’t some premium content created by Bee, it was created by other people. To then try to charge for it is absurd and unethical. Paying for general access to the server is one thing, servers cost money to keep online. Charging for features is quite another.
And if this race is paywalled, why not squidpeople or humans? These were closed with reference to them being coded poorly, which isn’t a reason to close them on first draft. They can be adjusted so the feature change can be merged into the game. They should however have had maintainer approval to open them, but it’s not apparent that qwerty obtained this either so I can understand the PR creators’ motivations. Either way now people have the capability to create even more patron-locked content.
If premium patron-only content is a thing in this game then it only opens the door to pay-to-win, paid expansions/DLCs and other shitty current game industry behaviours that a lot of us here play SS13 to avoid.
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I honestly thought this PR was just a meme when I heard about it but then seeing it get merged has just left me confused what the state of Bee has come to.
