Web Services for the Management of Persistent Online Game Factions

Star Wars Combine is a game involving thousands of players in a virtual world. Each player impersonates a character that continues evolving even when the player is not connected. Players have formed groups, called factions, that are self-organized. The more members a faction has, the more complicated to manage it becomes.
The goal of this work is to create an infrastructure to allow faction management tools to automatically update their data with the information maintained on the game server. The web services technology is chosen for the various advantages it offers. While this technology is already widely accepted in the business world, its use in a game context is totally new. It seems that web services have gained their place in the game world and will continue to be developed. Hopefully, this experiment will convince other game designers to adapt their platforms in a similar manner.