December 22nd, 2016 an individual by the name of Kaos sets up forums at acemulator.org for the purpose of it being “a central discussion hub for any potential Asheron’s Call emulator project.”.

January 10th, 2017, the infamous “AC Grandpa” video hits the front page of Reddit and attracts the attention of an individual by the name of Rawaho. Up until this point, Rawaho had never even heard of AC. Using only a few packet logs provided by someone on Reddit, he began working on an emulator in private. It’s important to note that Rawaho is well known in the MMO emulation community. He’s been involved with numerous emulators over the years and currently works full time for Warmane, which hosts seven private WoW servers with populations ranging from 500 to 15,000.

January 14th, 2017, Rawaho responds to a post on acemulator.org and reveals his emulator for the first time – https://imgur.com/a/mF9rO Written completely from scratch in C#, no legacy dependencies, and compatible with the latest client. This last part was impressive by itself since every other AC emulator only worked with clients over 10 years old. He achieved this feat in large part by discovering what nobody else in the history of AC emulation ever had – AC’s CRC algorithm. Previous emulators such as UAS relied on poorly understood assembly code ripped from the client.

Needless to say, people were excited with his progress. From this point on, most discussions took place in Discord, also set up by Kaos.

January 16th, 2017, Rawaho creates a Github repository and soon after submits the foundation of what is now ACE.

January 26th, 2017, an individual by the name of Pea makes a Reddit post describing his intentions to open source a number of AC related projects he had worked on in the early 2000s as a teenager. While not mentioned explicitly in the text of his post, several people noticed a server emulator in the screenshots he provided – https://imgur.com/a/lEPXv Several responses to his post mentioned the ACE Discord and after seeing the activity of the community there, he decided to update his old emulator, PhatAC, to work with the latest client. It wasn’t long after this that he started hosting a test server in the evenings. While you couldn’t do much, the ability to run around with other players in various dungeons was still fun for many. Pea started adding flashy features such as the ability to set your player model to any character that was packet captured by the community or virtually any monster in the game. As Pea’s popularity grew, he decided to split off from the ACE Discord and create his own, effectively splitting the AC community in two. Tensions between the two groups quickly escalated as various accusations came from both sides.

Meanwhile, Rawaho had achieved world entry with ACE and started working on the critical foundational systems. ACE, being open source, started receiving numerous contributions in the form of pull requests on Github. While several people had the ability to merge these contributions into the codebase, the responsibility to was given primarily to Rawaho. Rawaho was spending what little free time he had on coding and reverse engineering the AC client. Because of this, the Github pull requests started to pile up. Rawaho began receiving private messages from people saying he was ruining the project by not approving pull requests fast enough, emphasizing their desire to “catch up to Pea”. He tried to persuade people to be patient but his words fell on deaf ears.

By far Rawaho’s worst critic was a former Turbine developer by the name of Mogwai. Mogwai is not a game developer and has never worked on AC — he only worked on billing systems there. Being primarily experienced in enterprise software development, he wasn’t accustomed to emulation code which often prioritizes things such as raw performance over best practices. He publicly called Rawaho’s code “shit” and said major changes would need to be made before he would “even consider contributing”. Instead of shunning this individual from the project, he was welcomed in with open arms by Mag-nus because he “appreciated Mogwai’s enthusiasm”.

Rawaho stepped down as the lead developer of ACE but continued to provide advice to the team for some time. The simple truth, which many of the team didn’t want to hear, is that the remaining developers did not have the skills necessary to complete the project. He was vehemently attacked for making such comments and left the Discord altogether in response. The creator of ACE and the one person with actual MMO emulation and reverse engineering experience was the one ultimately shunned from the community, while Mogwai, the instigator of much of the drama, was made the lead developer.

Over the next several months ACE remained completely stagnant while Pea’s emulator became playable. Two sanctioned servers reached populations greater than the retail servers prior to shutdown. ACE, trying to give the illusion of progress, refactored their codebase numerous times but never really advanced any further. The main thing holding them back was the lack of server side physics.

Following Pea’s C&D from Warner Bros, the ACE project saw a glimmer of hope from an individual known as Anon, who started working on physics in a separate sandbox project in late September, early October. The extent of his progress was recently demonstrated by Immortalbob in the following video – https://youtu.be/FrsKdPoxJWw?t=180

It was Anon’s hope that the other ACE developers would focus on functionality that complemented his physics work and moved ACE in the direction of playability, such as combat and creature movement. Instead, ACE focused their attention on a new auth system and an API — two things completely unnecessary at ACE’s current stage of development. Anon began voicing his concerns publicly. However, just like with Rawaho, Anon’s advice went unheard, or worse, rebuked.

Today, October 28th, 2017, Anon officially leaves the project due to ACE’s lack of direction and priorities combined with the words of a few toxic individuals, primarily Mogwai (https://imgur.com/a/5UEWW).

In short, the leaders of ACE repeatedly repel those with the most skills and experience and retain those with the least. For this reason alone, ACE will never become a playable emulator.