ShhRP history

[Hudson633]

Name, abbreviation:

Shh Roleplay
ShhRP / Shh

Servers:

Half-Life 2 Roleplay (HL2RP) [Early 2008 ~ 2011]

Background & start:

Shh Roleplay has origins as far back as Feb 2008, and lasted until atleast 2011.

Soret wrote about the origins of Shh: "Sharpy started ShhRP in 2008, in the beginning he was doing some lua scripting for TnB and he named the server as Shh.. Script testing. And people were asking if he would start up a server with it, after that he did and he named the community as Shh RP."

He added that players "dissatisfied with the culture at TnB went over to Shh just like myself, and we started off as a roleplay community as the second most popular community at that time."

Funding:

It appears to have been funded by a mixture of server owners directly funding it and player donations. Their website from 2008 had a link to a donations page.

Operation & culture:

Their forum had atleast 1,500 threads.

Soret notes: "Through out the years many other people became leaders of the community, the community was basically held in place by its members whom were frequently passing around leadership of the community to other members. Imagine this as a council of players whom were members of the community."

Soret also mentioned notable people involved such as "ChristCarter, Dividium, Dicidius, Adrian, Actsub, Sharpy, Arctic, Stevo_1066, GeneralTrivium, Soren, Harry Kasaki whom still around, CaptainCookie, Killarag, and a bunch of others."

HL2RP server
Their Steam group states: "A serious Half-Life 2 roleplay community with its own canon." In mid 2008 their website noted in a news post that they had increased the slot limit to 42.

Shh veteran bubblegum said: "It was really popular, a good competitor to TnB at the time." Soret noted: "it was an actual community, a family" and adding "the roleplay was basically like on old 2000s text roleplay communities where a character's development was being pursued rather than someone's personal goals in a server perspective."

HL2RP maps
Their website had downloads page dated as 5th April 2008 that included rp_c18_v1 and a note that it was currently in use. A news post from later in the year read: "day and night is now turned on in C45." They also likely used the map Rp_City17_District47 at some point. There's a mention of City12 District14 but it's not clear if it was run.

Beyond Garry's Mod
The forum had a section for their CS:S Clan by 18th Aug 2008.

Culturally significant events

Ssh Roleplay reformed as Eximius Roleplay, and later merged with Insert Name Here.

Challenges:

Their Steam group posted an announcement on 21st April 2008 which stated that the server was fixed, implying it was down "because of the Garry's Mod update."

A news post from 11th May 2008 titled Shh is Back! noted: "our community has been the victim to multiple hacking/hijacking attempts, some of them successful and some of them not."

The website homepage in Nov 2008 read: "Despite the short scare we had that the community was at its end, we seem to have survived once again. The community is now safe again for a few months." It thanked a few members, and "anyone else who donated when shh was in need!"

Soret mentioned drama within Shh: "Of course there was a lot of drama inside the community, this was unique to Shh. Shh was a community with a sense of belonging where some players hated each other to the guts. United in bitter friendships, basically."

Soret said of the restarts, merge, and ending of Shh: "The community saw 8 shutdowns and restarts. Council positions were passed around like hot potato in the end and there was reluctancy to restart the community due to some Shh people and people from TnB were only making more drama. In the end Shh reformed in 2010 as Eximius Roleplay and later in 2010 merged into my community called as INH, Insert Name Here where I have managed to kill it off permanently by pure accident."

A Wayback Machine capture of their Steam group overview from 23rd Oct 2012 shows: "Rest in peace, Shh Roleplay."

References:

The Shh Roleplay Steam Group was founded on 14th February 2008:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/hl2roleplay

Their (now defunct) forum had a known peak of 945 members (on 25th Oct 2008).

Community scale:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/gca1/discussions/0/3196992424212532882/

A screencap of their forum (via Wayback Machine) from 10th Aug 2008:
https://i.imgur.com/wwhIoSM.png

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