Posted By The Nude Nerd on June 1, 2009

I play a free, browser-based game called Star Wars Combine. It’s sort of similar to Eve Online in that it is a “sandbox” type game, where the players control the universe. This game is hard to get into for a newer player, as generally they don’t know what to expect. Many come to realize it is not for them, as everything in the Combine happens in relation to real time. Traveling across the galaxy can take as short as 12 hours to jump one system over…  or a couple weeks to jump fully from one corner of the galaxy to the other. Building ships can take months if you’re building a capital ship, or maybe a week for the smaller fighters.

The economy is also a bit crazy. The Combine has been has been around for something like 10 years, in a constant state of “development” by programmers that work on it in their free time. Quite a few people are rich beyond belief, through being around forever,  stealing from others or being a leader of a large faction. Every month, factions earn income from their facilities they have built and  governments earn taxes from planets they own. The amount of money increases, but there aren’t many ways for the money to go away. Basically it’s just a continuous cycle of more money coming into the game, driving prices on ships, facilities, droids or whatever you’re looking for higher and higher. Just as an example, Bulk Freighters jumped from around 22 million credits to 30+ in the past month. This discourages most new players since they see most factions offering very low salaries.

Why does all this matter? Well, the glorious admins in all their wisdom have decided to change some fairly significant rules recently. The big part of this that applies to my group is the membership requirements. See, my group started out as a very small group of  friends pooling their assets and working together to build ourselves up on our own. We have come a long way from the 5 of us just starting out with almost nothing. Now, we have 3 factions and billions in assets. We are a government, a mining faction and a ship production faction. You could say we have been very successful for what we started with.

The admins changing the rules has threatened this. Now, they want us to have 35 members just for the government faction. The other two factions need to have at least 10 members each, bringing the total required to 55 members. We have maybe 40 active members. If we can’t get more people, we face losing our government status.

So I’m looking for your help. It doesn’t require much of you. All we need is to get some people that would be willing to log into the game once a week. You don’t have to actually play. If you’d be willing to help, please comment here or contact me and I’ll tell you what you have to do. Again, all I am asking is for you to log in to a website once a week. We’d really appreciate your help.

I hate using my blog/twitter to ask this…  but I’ve spent several years playing this game and I don’t want to lose it all because the admins decided they want to get rid of the smaller groups. I’m in need of your help. Thanks.

Categories: Gaming, Star Wars Combine
Tags: Star Wars, Star Wars Combine