How to Build a website forum like epvp?

Hello everyone,

I have a small team in my hometown and we want to build a gaming forum for our Country. We want it to have mechanics like elitepvpers. Website and Forum in one place, profile mechanics like badges etc.. We have our hosting and web domen and we know how to build a website in wordpress, but we don't know how to conect it to forum or how to build a forum on the same website. We tryed with phpBB but that just redirect us "to another website forum " which is already finished the way we don't like.

So my questions to you is:

How is the elitepvpers built? Which softwares were required? Is it connected to wordpress? Is it made from the scratch or maybe some kind of a template?

We are willing to spend next years in learning to code and work with php, mysql, css, html, javascript etc. to build something like this. We just need some beginner guidance in the right direction.

Thank you all for the upcoming answers.

Elitepvpers uses [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...] (which you can't buy official anymore, newest version is vBulletin 5)
the "homepage portal" and other features are probably PHP Plugins made for vBulletin 3 (some are not public available and are self-made by epvp staff)
it doesn't use any other cms (like wordpress) as far as I know

if you use Wordpress you can add a forum plugin like [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...] which integrates without any hassle into your site
OR you install bridge plugins between Wordpress and your forum cms (Example: [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...] if you use [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...] as forum software)

#moved