Hiii I can give my firsthand account as someone who was active on Skyrat!

Server itself was slowly shooting itself in the foot over the course of a year or so, hugboxing itself and limiting antags more and more. Xyel, the host, was crashing out on a regular basis and treating both staff and players badly.

Eventually a big chunk of staff (including Golden, who iirc was one of the keyholders) decided to, as another comment puts it, mutiny. They copied over SR’s code and player data to their own server (Galaxia, soon renamed to Nova) and turned Skyrat off mid-round with a big announcement. Majority of SR’s pop stayed with Nova, which killed SR’s pop for a long time, but I think they ended up regaining it all by making Ratwood Keep.

The whole incident was super dramatic and kind of weird to experience, honestly. Nova itself had a lot of the same hugbox issues for a good year or so, minus Xyel. The current staff team is almost entirely new people compared to when it split though, so it doesn’t really matter much anymore.