Everything is going down on April 27th at an as-of-yet undisclosed time.
That's barely enough time to level up a dozen 50's!!
There was talk in the Discord, so if you want to learn more, read through old comments there, but essentially what happened was the admins suggested that there'd be a vote on whether or not to keep the characters, and a minor firestorm erupted. People are concerned, after the events of the past week, about elitism and fairness, especially given that some people have been able to get on whenever and others have had significant difficulties in getting on. It's regrettable, but as I understand it the decision is final.
And this is something that I think most people are forgetting in their fervor: No more official Devs. The Devs were the ones who set the parameters of the game, attempted to keep it balanced, allowed for easy and difficult challenges.
But, when the code gets distributed so that 'anyone' can run the game and invite others to play... well players are going to find that one person has used the Dev powers to make everyone level 50, and another one won't let you make any Stalkers, and another one replaced all the Clockwork models with unicorns.
There are no more arbiters of how the game is supposed to be. Dev-ing and GM-ing and Modding will be wild and unpredictable. And assuredly in some cases, blatantly unfair.