Interactions between players in a MMOG are well known for years and are accurately described in many sources [IGD03], [MP03]. Common archetypal behaviours have been identified and defined: warrior, explorer, builder, and so on. All these archetypes and interactions will be found in the Combine. All possible variations will appear sooner or later. It should be noted that the Combine is not using the typical class system used by many RPG systems. The only vague reference to it will be offering pre-made templates for character creation.

The following figure illustrates easily the number of possible interactions in a group of n players. This number directly depends of the number of players in the form of:

Star Wars is about a civil war between the Empire and the Rebellion. Both these factions exist in the Combine and the players may decide to join them or not. Each of these factions has the control of the game universe and the defeat of the opponent as main objectives. These goals are the base of the faction interactions.

The other factions will decide themselves of what their objectives will be, essentially depending on their type. Some military type faction will side with the Empire, others with the Rebellion, and some will even try to remain neutral during the galactic conflict. The commercial factions will try to insert themselves into the economical cycles of the Combine. Some will produce assets and items for the Empire, some for the Rebellion, some for both or none of them. Other factions will propose various services to the players, to other factions, or even both. The number of interactions will depend of the number of faction according to the same rule than for characters, except that more types of interactions are possible between 2 factions.

The Combine defined and implemented various game mechanisms allowing a faction to reach an objective easier than a character. However, the Combine implemented simultaneously various faction restrictions preventing them to become omnipotent. As long as factions will be forced to interact in anyway, the game dynamic will be ensured.

We should not forget the interactions between factions and some individual players. As the characters are free to join a faction, or to abstain completely from joining any of them, some interactions will happen between these individuals and some factions. However, these actions will usually be quite similar to the interactions between players (section 1). The following figure may resume this particular type of interactions.

Another new type of interactions appearing in the Combine is generated by the interactions of the players inside the same faction. We exposed previously (section 2) that factions are managed by a leader who could grant management privileges to some of the faction members. For example, he can give individual members of his faction the right to assign the ships of his faction to other players, or the right to manage the money owned by the faction. It should be noted that this particular feature allows the distribution of work, but also of power, and thus allows the effective management of large groups with a few hundred players, thousands of ships and dozens or even hundreds of planets to control. This means that a large faction can build, defend, and develop a large territory consistently over time, independently from individual players, who may come and leave, while the faction will last. Therefore, some players will command other players through the intermediary of their character. This very specific feature acts as a powerful drug on the players. It is much more exciting to command real players and to lead them to war against another group of real players than to be alone and fight NPC monsters, or to sporadically fight and kill individual players in player versus player combat (PvP).

With the membership growth of some factions; these have to organize themselves very carefully. Some players will quickly assume the task to manage the other members, to organize them into sub-groups with specific tasks and game duties. Each group will try to reach or help to reach a particular faction objective. All these interactions lead to the creation of a multitude of games to play in parallel to the Combine: the faction games.

These faction games happening in parallel to the main game quests provide more objectives to the players. Some will struggle to become Emperor one day, while some will propose new activities to their faction. Often, the faction leaders, along with the members they selected to share their power, will be the ones who will provide game quests to the other faction members.

Such an organization will require a high density of communication between the members of a faction. Usually, they use existing communication tools like emails, ICQ, mIRC, MSN, or whatever. Sometimes, some phone each other or even meet for real during a few hours. The Combine noticed that often, the success of a group is directly proportional to the fun provided by these internal communications. If a faction fights to permanently role-play their communication, it will create an effect of immersion for the members. They will really feel as part of the Galactic Empire from Star Wars or part of the Rebel Alliance or whatever other smuggler group. They will feel belonging to something bigger than a simple player coalition in a game with the goal to destroy the other coalitions. The following graphic illustrates a typical faction organization, with the classic chain of command and sub-cells characteristics.

The Combine developers do not neglect these parallel games. If some features can be easily implemented to enhance the role-play and the immersion feeling for the players, then they will code them. A good example is the concept of the information fields. These 3 fields attached to each character allow the faction leader to enter some additional information about some of his faction members. Usually, the first field, which is often displayed before the character handle, contains information about the character title or rank he earned inside his faction. The second and third fields are generally used to store information about the faction department or cell where the character is assigned. Concretely, a character named "Luke Skywalker" with the information fields set respectively to "Commander", "Red Squadron", "Liberty Fleet", would commonly appear in the game to the other players as "Commander Luke Skywalker", and anyone of his faction with the necessary privileges to manage the faction members list would see the following information on the faction members list:
Commander Luke Skywalker
Red Squadron
Liberty Fleet

This generates much more recognition for the players and allows them to easily understand whom they are facing in the game.

While these parallel games happening inside each faction have evident advantages for the quality of the game play, they unfortunately do not come without a high cost. The players in charge of managing the factions have to dedicate a lot of time to organize the faction. They have to write faction directives, reports about the progress they made toward the achievement of the assigned objectives. Interacting with real people instead of simulated characters leads inevitably to real work. Therefore, for many players who are organizing the factions, a lot of their game related activity is no longer perceived as gaming and fun, but as work. Instead of simply playing and retrieving hours of fun from the game, they have to provide input, dedication, and work to the game. These tasks they have to perform may spoil the fun these players get from the game. Anyway, some cases of players sticking to the game simply to perform what they consider as some kind of duty have been observed. The Combine is reaching a limit between a game providing fun and a simulation requiring efforts to create results.

In these parallel games, the personal skills of the player, that we should not confuse with the skills of the character, as we are speaking here of the player intelligence, ability to organize the work, to solve problems, to lead other people and so on, will make the difference. In such games, having the highest XP level or the more powerful game weapons, will not help in commanding other players. Life has no example of a 12-years-old kid successfully commanding an army of 200 men. A charismatic leader would rather be necessary.