Teslo here, veteran of S&S (now banned). Figured I'd chime in, since I was one of the original developers and left shortly after the current S&S team began teaching themselves to code (long before Djranger was apart of anything).
Rather than type some longwinded shit about how awful they have become as business men and server owners, I'll just mark up some key points: -They use TS to enable communication with developers, except all devs are locked in a channel and never answered PMs. There is no direct communication aside from !admin in game and spamming PMs, forums that very few of them read. -Rather than fix a problem, they'd code over it or around it and cause more issues. DJRanger has done a lot to mitigate this, but one developer surrounded by a bunch of apes teaching themselves to code isn't helping. -They spent a considerable amount of time encrypting all of their server-side changes despite a significant portion of their wasteland code is available if you unpack the mission. -No suggestions were tested at length, instead a temporary map was started with the change and if it wasn't bugged it was implemented. Zero fucking QA. Garbage. -They played under assumed names as if the 403 tag was somehow inciting anger towards them, it's the endless griefing with aircraft (regardless of your name, you fucking idiots) that will never be fixed because a significant amount of the admins flew. -Hordicus is a good person, but given his schedule he wasn't available when he was needed a lot of the time. Instead, he tried to divvy up responsibilities to a bunch of immature asshats that cared little to none for the general server populations wants and needs. -The only people left were complete newbs and powergamers, with no real medium tier vehicles, emplacements, or options without donating or getting very lucky and murdering a moderator/random donator.
Oh, and if you're reading this and want to reach similar performance, change the backend database and run it in a RAM disk (also the default color shifts cause lag).
They used to be great, but they rival League of Legends in toxicity of their community. Enjoy your slow decline.