StarQuest #12: The Stealthily Fought War

Originally Posted on Sep 2, 2015

This section is a direct follow-up to part ten. At the top of part ten, I wrote a note about objectivity. That note applies to this section as well. This post was extremely difficult to write, as it does not cast me in a positive light, and it forced me to remember quite a lot of painful things that I would sooner forget.

As work on 3.0 began, Stealthy and I started to argue more and more frequently. Arguing with Stealthy was nothing new; we verbally dueled several times a week as part of our development process. Whenever a new idea was proposed, a lively argument usually followed. Whoever presented the concept had to be prepared to defend it against the other, who played the role of devil’s advocate and attempted to find all of its weak spots. In this way, we made sure that everything we did was logically sound. But from January to April-ish, the arguments began to intensify, until we were debating almost every day. They also began to lose their friendliness; they became less debates and more true arguments. We began to not see eye to eye on a lot of things. In hindsight, I believe the core problem was this: Stealthy came to StarQuest thinking of it as a business. I remember on the day we recruited him, he asked Wolf and I if he needed to sign an NDA, a non disclosure agreement. I laughed to myself then, because at that time we were in the midst of bungeecord, and we could barely keep the server running for 12 hours without it crashing. Non disclosure agreements were the last thing on our minds. He quickly realized how disorganized we really were, and took it upon himself to attempt to improve us, and form us into a true company.

At the time (and still today) StarQuest is managed less like a business and more like some sort of high school sports team. Everyone who works on StarQuest is just a volunteer; their payment is free permanent priority and that’s it. Because nobody is paid, I very rarely give orders to anyone; instead, I try to always phrase things as requests. I frequently tell people that real life comes first, and if they can’t get something done for me, they shouldn’t worry about it. I am also very young to be running any sort of company, so I rely on my senior staff to help me with most major decisions. I try to avoid making any decision of any importance without first talking it over with at least one trusted staff member.

Stealthy did things differently. He was very quickly accepted as a partner to the company due to his experience level, gaining the developer (not junior developer) title almost immediately. As a developer rank, he had authority over the rest of the staff; developer is the rank that wolf and I use. However, as I previously mentioned, he saw StarQuest as a business, and he saw the moderators as employees rather than teammates. He gave orders rather than asking favors, and he reacted very strongly when he was argued with. He made his own decisions and, once decided, rarely felt the need to explain himself to anyone. To him, moderators were employees; they were paid with player respect and priority, and in return were expected to work.

Now, as you might imagine, this approach did not go over well with the staff. Looking back, it is an effective method, and I think if he had started a brand new server the staff would have accepted it without question. But our staff were used to my soccer team approach, and so they were shocked when Stealthy came in and started treating them so differently. He quickly made himself their enemy.

At the time, when this was first beginning, I didn't fully understand what was going on. I didn't understand Stealthy’s thought process; I just thought he just had a blunt personality. When staff members came to me complaining, I asked them to put up with it, and attempted to talk to Stealthy, trying to convince him to be more friendly with his approach. When I did this, he was often already angry at the staff member, and he usually expected me to back him up to put the staff member in their place. Any attempt to convince him that he had also acted badly usually ended with him astounded that I considered him even slightly in the wrong. To him, he was just doing his job, and couldn't understand why the moderators weren't doing theirs.

To make matters worse, Stealthy was going through an extremely rough patch in his real life, with problems both at work and in the life of his family (he is a father). His frustration with his real world problems certainly served to shorten his temper when dealing with StarQuest. He often exploded in anger over seemingly small things. I believe he is typically a level-headed man, but he was under an extreme amount of stress, and it is understandable that it can wear on a person.

While he was having staff issues periodically, Stealthy also was attempting to get Wolf and I to adopt industry-standard coding processes. Our code process at that point more or less consisted of Wolf and I working on separate projects simultaneously and then putting them on the server when they were done. Stealthy pushed us to use version control systems in order to collaborate better. He also pushed for the adoption of other, undoubtedly superior, practices such as a better database system. At this time, I was working my butt off every day attempting to fix the thousands of bugs of Bungee, and I did not want to worry about adopting any new practices; I just wanted to fix what we already had. The new database system required me to learn a new programming language, and the version control system was difficult to understand and very unintuitive to use. I didn't fully understand why we needed them; to me, the old system of separate projects was working fine. I didn't see the need to change. To me, it was just adding more problems onto our mountain of existing issues. Wolf was wiser than I and adopted the new systems quickly, but I fought them for awhile, preferring to continue working with what I knew.

This post is probably several pages long at this point, so I’m going to skip most of the long sad tale of AoS and focus on SQ. Suffice to say that, as AoS entered beta, Stealthy saw it and took an interest in it. He took over leadership of the project and made it his own, going through several iterations of redesigns spanning several months. Eventually the project grew so large and over-complicated that it stagnated; barely any progress was made for months at a time. Eventually, I made the call: If the project did not make any progress in the next month, I promised to cancel it, as it was costing us money. It progressed no further, so it died. Since then, the best parts of the AoS concept have been redesigned into WotF.

And finally, the last issue that was really a problem between Stealthy and I was his unwillingness to actually produce code. He was an effective manager and he gave good advice to Wolf and I, but he could never be convinced to actually code anything after the initial round of bungee fixes. This frustrated me, because Wolf was increasingly inactive, meaning that the vast majority of SQ’s workload fell onto my shoulders. To make matters worse, the sheer amount of time spent debating with him was cutting into my own working time. Many days passed when I would come home, debate for hours, and then log off the computer because I was too tired to try to work after such a mental battle. To me, it seemed like he was not only not producing anything, but he was eating into my productivity.

All of these things came together to bring things to the breaking point. The dam was breached one day with an extremely heated argument; I believe it was a case of censorship on the forums. Stealthy had deleted something, I thought it should have stayed; the actual content doesn’t even matter now. It was an issue that we both felt strongly about and things escalated quickly. Now, I usually pride myself on my ability to maintain calm during debates, but after so many months of struggles, I reached my limit, and to my shame I unloaded the full strength of my grievances on him all at once. He was aware of the strain on our relationship, but he was completely blindsided. We argued. At the end of the night, I don’t think he really understood most of the issues I presented. Having not planned to confront him then, I hadn’t prepared anything beforehand, so my points were far less coherent than normal. From there, things spiraled further out of control. We would argue for a few days, not resolving much of anything, and then we would break for a few days. This process repeated a few times.

I should mention that throughout this entire process, Wolf held himself mostly above the arguments, and participated as little as possible. He generally supported Stealthy’s desire to introduce better coding practices, but also privately wondered why Stealthy never did any work. After my confrontation with Stealthy, after yet another collapse in our attempts to reconcile, I met with Wolf and asked him to sign a document giving me sole control of SQ. Wolf, who at that point did not want to work any further on SQ, agreed. Two of the three developers agreed; it was done. Stealthy took it as a betrayal, and it was, but it was the only solution that I could see. We argued a few more times still attempting to settle our differences, but the rift was far too wide to heal, and the whole affair ended abruptly when he suddenly stopped replying. I have had no direct interaction with him since then. And that is the end of the sad tale of my relationship with Stealthy.

Now, having said all of that, you must again remember that this is told from my point of view, and it is going to contain a bias towards my viewpoint. You have probably come away with a more negative view of Stealthy than I intended, because I told only the negatives in attempting to describe the reasons that our partnership fell apart. I should add, though, that Stealthy was also kind, caring, and compassionate. He was an excellent friend and the mentor that Wolf and I didn’t know we needed. He was a brilliant planner and the best critical thinker I ever met. Without his efforts, SQ almost certainly would have collapsed some time after bungeecord, and there certainly never would have been a 3.0. The things that have worked best about 3.0 were his designs, and the things that have proven to be the most problematic were the parts that were designed after he left, without the benefit of his debates.

Would I ever invite him back to SQ? No. I’ve thought about it, several times. But at the end of the day, our goals were too different; it would never have worked out. I’d love to work with him again on something in the future, but it would take some serious work to heal the gap between us, or even for us to really understand each other. So we’ll see.



Wow, that was long. I didn’t even talk about AoS, or the 3.0 development happening during all of this, or the Dragoth incident or anything. Really, this post could be twice as long, but this will have to do. This is why it took me so long to post parts ten and eleven. Thanks for reading this far.

Next time: 3.0 development & launch.