Limelight Gaming history

[Hudson633]

Branding:

Name	Limelight Gaming
Abbreviation	LL
Tag	[L²]

Servers:

Server	Gamemode	Timeline
CityRP	CityRP	Aug 2015 - Aug 2021
Trouble in Terrorist Town	TTT	Dec 2020

Background & start:

Launched around August 2015, atleast some of the founders had experience from Fearless RP, and wanted to essentially make their own style of CityRP server. Temar was listed in the staff role of Owner, and a Core Manager role was assigned to Bambo, Doctor Internet, and Pinky. Other core staff included Burnett, ♥♥♥♥, and goigle.

Funding:

A veteran explains: "It was funded pretty well by donations, both hosting of 3 servers (later only 2), forums, TS etc as well as payment of developers, the community was pretty profitable for most of its run up until the last 2 years or so of its existence. In about 2016-2017 this got changed to a "Membership" product for again legal reasons but for all intents and purposes remained the same as the donations before it."

An announcement in April 2020 explained an update to the membership system: "Membership status is acquired in increments of 1 month rather than 3, with the price adjusted to £2/month. You can still pay for multiple months in advance, and there is a new optional subscription service for your convenience. Alongside this, there is one Membership feature change – active Members will benefit from a flat % bonus to their inventory space instead of receiving more pockets."

Operation & culture:

Community culture
They had a forum with over 4,000 members which links a small scale Wiki on CityRP. They also used a 128 slot Teamspeak from August 2015 where meetings were held for players to ask the staff questions. They listed an addon for sale, described as "a custom designed system for putting license plates on vehicles. The code is written in Lua, with the complete system sold online at GModStore." An announcement in June 2016 explained that "Limelight has become a registered company".

Discord
The "owner" of the Limelight Gaming Discord server was Temar, and their server join date was 8th Nov 2017, with other staff members joining over the next few days. It had a peak of atleast 249 members. Link:
https://discord.com/invite/ZnyeYe4

CityRP culture
A Steam group announcement from 5th August 2015 titled Servers going live tonight! noted the planned released between 6-8 pm GMT, with another announcement the next day mentioning V33X (possibly rp_evocity_v33x). Other maps mentioned include V2D (perhaps rp_evocity_v2d) in October, Rockford by April 2016, and V4b1 at 75 slots in August 2016.

A Dupe Transfer system was mentioned, possibly implying that props were used for roleplay scenes. Limelight was described as "the CityRP giant facing off against FearlessRP" and was often called CityRP 2. It also had Live, Build, and Events servers, with a US dedicated server launched in December 2015. The addition of new vehicles were sometimes mentioned in announcements.

Another veteran describes: "It was this - weird more serious version of darkrp. It was actually like an older darkrp when it still kinda had RP as a thing. It was like this 11 year old gamemode and by the end of it it showed, it runs like complete ♥♥♥♥ and is so badly optimised, so many devs have worked on it and there's not much documentation from the early days."

There was a 5% salary bonus for joining the Steam group, described in an announcement "Hopefully this will provide some decent - but not game-breaking - incentive for both new and old players to join our Steam group". An announcement in May 2021 described a cooking update: "In the past, only chefs were able to manufacture food and all other classes had to rely on their availability, unless they went out to the lake to fish some of the many fishes that are in there."

One of the only two rules about crime explains: "When mugging players, you may demand a maximum of $1,500. You may not mug the same player twice within 15 minutes." Other rule sections include FearRP, Job Rules, New Life Rule, Vehicle Rules, Tools and Prop Rules, Door rules, Base rules, Hostage rules, Government forces rules, Raid rules, and Map rules.

A screencap of the map:
https://i.imgur.com/7Wsx9bj.jpeg

Weekly REP update
Described in an announcement in May 2016: "The 'Weekly REP update' is to highlight roleplays done by players within the community. As we aim to help roleplay in anyway shape or form this thread will either be updated or published each week so that people are recognized for brilliant roleplay whilst on the server!" Whether this was run consistently every week is not clear, but the concept was unique.

Events
An announcement in Oct 2015 titled Limelight Community Event Series #1 revealed a week of roleplay events, and at the end of the month there was a Halloween Purge RP event. Some announced events were not described, including one titled The Great Event '72 in November, followed by a Christmas event in December. An Easter egg hunt was announced on 27th March 2016, followed by The Dictatorship: Reprise in April, and The Day of the Disaster! & Tranquility Lane in May.

There was a CityRP Competition in July 2016 to earn REP points and $200k in-game money, with a suggestion to "Create nice dupes as they attract more attention from other players more often than not which leads to more RP opportunities" and "Post a thread in the appropriate area of our forum to show-off your role-plays." There was an announcement for a Maze Runner event in March 2017, a Racing event in April, a Freedom or Oppression event in July, and something called Efest! LL anniversary to celebrate "LL's 2nd anniversay" at the Rockford nightclub on 31st July 2017.

A "community based event" was held in Sept 2017. Another Maze Runner was run in May 2018. In October there was an announcement for a SeriousRP night. On 15th Aug 2019 an announcement described a trading card event, described: "After 2 years without a card event, we wanted to celebrate this 4th-year milestone with an event! As per usual, players can collect a total of 12 cards (including the foil cards). Cards will be rewarded for a REP, purchasing membership or moneypacks or using in-game currency to purchase booster packs."

In 2019 another Halloween event was described: "This year marks our 3rd Halloween season! Along with 2 horror maps, 7 achievements, over 44 new items, and zombie NPCs, 4 new accessories and you can also participate in the pumpkin collection event." More Serious RP events were announced for 1st March 2020 and 1st June. There was a CityRP Session described as a scheduled play session held at a time when the Gmod playercount was shrinking.

TTT server
A forum thread announced the launch of their Trouble in Terrorist Town server, opening it at 17:00 UTC 8th December 2020. It featured a custom deathscreen and HUD, and had a points shop and statistics screen. A thread comment mentions that a trial of the server had been run long before this launch.

A veteran mentions the server: "There was a brief attempt at a TTT server but that fizzled out and a few attempts at branching into other games." Their TTT rules page was 9,147 words long. In comparison, their CityRP ruleset was 2,523 words.

Beyond Garry's Mod:

Arma 3
Writing in Jan 2022, a veteran explained: "There is still an Arma 3 unit that is kinda still associated and they are still incorporated as a company (they incorporated years ago for legal reasons, I didn't and still don't agree with) but the arma 3 unit sorta does it's own thing and for all real intents and purposes the community died a death."

Part of a forum thread for their involvement in Arma 3 reads: "Ares Defence Services is the name of our project which is an expansion into Arma 3. With a persistent live server during the week and planned, staff and player-driven, narrative operations on the weekend there’s always something to be taking part in." Their forum linked to a 20 slot server running Takistan.

Minecraft
An announcement on 26th June 2016 titled Limelight Gaming Tekkit Legends described "After a lot of consideration we have decided to open up our community to the Technic community" and listed some server details, but didn't specify if this was a Minecraft server, so it's only been assumed here that it was for Minecraft.

Space Engineers
An announcement from 29th Nov 2016 explained "Our Space Engineers server is now live and all the information to connect can be found on the thread below." But the thread link was dead when checked in March 2022.

Challenges:

In August 2015 an announcements described that there was "minor downtime whilst we fix a stability issue in relation to a few crashes that can be avoided" and another, regarding server host issues: "We're having some issues, but sadly they're not on our end and seem to be on OVHs, meaning we can't do anything."

Limelight "went under" in August 2021.

References:

Their Steam group:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/LimeLightG

The Limelight forum:
https://limelightgaming.net

A screencap of their forum from 12th Jan 2022:
https://i.imgur.com/85NFk5r.jpeg

Limelight Gaming community scale:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/gca1/discussions/0/3759977946664304100/

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