Creating a character is a fairly easy process, with a short wait for approval required. Once inside the game proper, though, things become a little more involved. The game community is frankly excellent, but the main criticism of this game relates to its accessibility. It is very difficult for a newbie to get started in the galaxy.
Remedying this a little is the fact that many factions will actively petition the player to join them, offering incentives to do so such as credits, ships, training. This helps a great deal as advice is offered in abudance, it can all be very overwhelming.
The thing to bear in mind is that the factions need new players more than players need new factions. Even players who idle for months on end will rarely be kicked. Factions need members and so kicking new players from their rosters only hurts the faction itself in the long run.
This can mean that some factions will simply recruit and leave the new player to their own devices. This, of course, has its good and bad points. Others will take a more active interest in their new members.
While it is not necessary to be online for hours each day, or even to log in every day, the game as a whole will work better (and factions will be more receptive) to those who can log in regularly and are active. Go idle for too long and you might find your character lost without much in the way of resources. The perils of relying on those early new players handouts from factions.
There are three main aspects to the game. It is possible to wander around the galaxy or individual worlds, interacting with the game and earning credits, xp and equipment. Anohter option is to roleplay on the games forums and earn rewards that way. Finally, a large community has grown around the game, which includes roles for artists, graphics designers, etc. In addition to this latter option are a number of jobs which the game designers contract out to players for appropriate rewards.
All in all this makes for a very interesting game, but it is harmed a little by the aforementioned accessibility issues. This is the root cause of a high attrition rate amongst new players. In turn, this high attrition rate fosters a high percentage of long term players who view 'noobs' with disdain.
As most of the new characters are old players, they already have a network of contacts and cliques with whom to interact. This makes finding roleplaying opportunities harder still for genuinely new players.
All in all an excellent game with incredible depth. This is, however, a game that will demand a great deal of new players. Having said that, a proactive attitude and a willingness to work hard to carve a niche for a new character can go a long way to fixing any issues.
Weblink: www.swcombine.com Rating: 4/5
There has been something of a controversy arisen within this game. To cut a long story short, a player created a character to work the way up through the ranks of a light side org only to then transfer all the orgs assets to a dark side org when they eventually took power. While a laudible action, taking years to come to fruition as it did, there were no IC means for the plan to fail/the lightside org to combat the ploy.
ReplyDeleteThis does rather suggest that the site as a whole plays very fast and loose with the golden rule of roleplaying. This player has clearly muddied IC and OOC actions and knowledge to an uncomfortable degree.
As of the point at which I stopped logging into the site, it looked like the admins were taking no action and player consensus seemed to be vocally on the side of the players who'd manipulated the mechanics of the game over roleplaying. As such, for now, I'd refrain from calling this a true roleplaying site.