Quote from: Allie55 on March 01, 2017, 06:58:41 PM
If you're looking for a quick (read: lots of information) summary with details, I think I'm the best to give it to you.

In 2004, N-Log made BOUT. In 2006, Acclaim published an english version.
Around 2009, several hackers from gamecheetah learned about packet editing using WPE (namely auron and later zirak).
Later in 2009, Auron and an ex-vGM from the english BOTS (Tok) decided to start a private server by using the game's client and mirroring the server's game packets.
Auron decided he was no longer interested, and he released the source code to his unfinished work, known as EnchantedBOTS. It was a rough source that had loginserver working and a couple in-game things, but was really sketchy cause it's an unfinished work. Very few people were able to even get it to work.

Myself, Kenny (Santa) and Matt (RedShadow), fellow hackers from gamecheetah (and, already running our own hack website, botscheetah at the time), took the opportunity to grab his code and continue work on it using our own website as a base.
Our website was, at the time, a domain borrowed from Kenny's father, named thenewoutpost.com.
Once we got things working, we named it BoutCheetah and invited several friends for a closed beta while we made things work (at this time, things like drops, base, trading, guilds, etc were still being developed).
Then, once everything was reasonably finished, we used our BOTS hacks to advertise the game (namely orange texting using a bot we made). I won't defend us here, we were kind've scumbags when we were younger, but it may have been the reason BC was big in the first place.

In late 2009, we looked at BC's popularity and decided maybe it's actually worth investing into instead of treating it as a joke hobby. At this point, we shut it down and publicly lied about Acclaim shutting us down. Instead, we worked on fixing it up, smoothed out membership for real profits, and re-released it a few months later.
We opened a second closed beta so we can confirm everything's smoothed out. For those that were invited, many of them consider this the best time BC's ever had, with an active close-knit community of less than 50.
Closed beta ends and everyone's welcome back to a new website, the one you're using now, zylongaming.com.

Throwing a line to itself here to announce BOTS shutdown on August 25 2010.

While BC was growing, Zirak came to help us develop some things with ASM. For example, he made coin items tradeable and did several other noteable things of the sort.
Ultimately, we had our differences and he left, and with Tok decided to start a competing server named BOUT Evolution.
They used our packets to build, because BOTS was no longer available.
In 2011 this server was functioning, but was really buggy and crashed a lot. They mainly consisted of a small community of players who refused to join BC because it was ran by the assholes who "killed" BOTS (reasonable).
They decided to start a lot of drama with us, and attempted to take some of our playerbase by being a (at the time) completely free game with free droppable coins.

In the midst of all this, in 2012 a new server randomly shows up in Indonesia. A company named OrangeGame apparently had the original source code for the server, and was able to actually modify things instead of reverse them like we do.
We found out about it first, and began ripping some of their stuff to add to our game. This is where levels such as 149 and transes such as Xia came from.
We offered them a significant sum of money on multiple occasions and multiple places for the source (namely, in the tens of thousands in usd for a game that never has more than 10 online).
We asked them on their website, we tracked their employees and even their ceo on facebook and sent them a message. Never a reply.
Unfortunately they mostly just released the game, completely randomly, then abandoned it and it eventually shut down. Even I'm not sure what their goal was, but the CEO was rich as ****, maybe he just didn't care about the lost profits.

Moving on, the developers of Evolution eventually got bored and gave up, as expected, in late 2011-early 2012. We had no competition again, but we weren't doing all that much at this time.
We offered to co-host their servers, similar to how we host BOTS, with the same database they used to use and everything. It was purely for the users, and they would get a share of the profits. They declined.

Around this time, we decided we wanted a bots server. For that reason, we began work on our BOTS 2006 version.
It was made mostly from scratch, as we were comfortable with the code at this point. Instead of working in reverse, removing things from BC, I added every item individually with the help of jrharbort and several other players from 2006.
Our goal was to add new content every few months and eventually end up at 2008 bots, where it ended.
When it released, it was a fairly big hit, with 50+ online at once and everything seemed like a success. Similar to closed beta of the second opening of BC, many consider this the best time BOTS had.
Eventually, people lost interest, and as such Kenny's motivation in the project dropped. I mostly took over as its sole admin and kept things working the best I could.

In late 2012-early 2013, Evolution decided again that they were coming back, and with a cool new website to offer. Unfortunately it didn't get very far, as even before the website was finished they got bored again. They took a few interested people, but ultimately there isn't much history to discuss here.

At a critical point, late 2013 Kenny gets involved with she-who-wont-be-named. This person took massive advantage of him, and drove a wedge between us by early 2014. By the time he realized this person was a parasite we were barely friends and he was no longer very interested in working with me, or BC in general. He decided to take a long break.

During this break, someone decided to start a new server named Eagle. There isn't anything particularly noteworthy to say about these guys, admin was bipolar and shut it down every couple weeks.

I upheld BC as long as I could until he finally came back, January of 2015, and we worked on a couple updates. He left again.
Once again I did what I could until November of 2015, when he came back and we worked on a couple updates. He left again.
This time of leaving, it would seem he's officially done working with me, and for now that means no events, bugfixes or official updates of any kind. This leaves us to where we are now.

Sorry if I missed anything, lot of information here.
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