To elaborate on the topic of “The underlying problem is not technical, but a matter of will”:
No one knows yet what is the cause of those disconnections. The bug may have been introduced in the master branch after the 0.55.5 release or in the 0.56 branch. We even don't know yet if the disconnection only happens in the vanilla games or mods. Someone suggested a revert, we don't even know what to revert if there is something we can revert.
The Unvanquished project planned everything for this situation to not happen: We planned and done a release-candidate cycle of one complete month. Release-candidate builds were provided. A test server was set-up.
Almost all of the testing were done by only two peoples: Slipher and myself. It appears this is not enough. Testing those release-candidate builds required no development skill, it required more testers willing to help.
We also observed some model bugs, related to the model change Reaper implemented to speed-up things (which is welcome). Those models bugs are less critical (unless they are linked to the disconnection, we have no idea), but the story is the same: Reaper, Slipher and myself did all the testing and it looks like that wasn't enough. For testing this, people only needed to rebuild the engine and the game and run local games, something a lot of people in the Unvanquished community know how to do.
It happens that we had everything in hand to prevent this situation to happen. But instead, people were and are still focusing on less critical things. For example some people focused on releases meeting the schedule at the exact second.
Some people are also focusing on the annoyance that people are less available after the release because of the rest they need.
Some people also focused on discussing if an existing bool was a nice design or not when fixing a code around it, things like that.
I'm not saying that to blame people, but as a diagnostic of the situation, in order to find the right treatment or solution.
All of this look to be misqualification of priorities.
None of those things were related to Quality Assurance. All the hours poured by myself and Slipher in doing Quality Assurance weren't enough, they needed help and contributions, not expectations.
It looks like the top priority of most of the community became to win arguments. I encourage everyone to shift their priority to something that really matters.
Yet again, I'm not saying that to blame people, but as a diagnostic of the situation, in order to find the right treatment or solution.
Our priority is to reconciliate and to work together again, for the benefit of everyone. No one is getting any benefit from shifting priority from collaboration to fighting.
We can do it, we just need the will. I have that will, I invite you to make this will yours.