TIE Corps Discord Server

The TIE Corps Discord server was created in September 2016 by LC Miles Prower. At the time, the TIE Corps was using Telegram as its non-email platform and at the time there was a lot of hesitation to move from Telegram to Discord. The main concern was the amount of comfort that pilots had built with Telegram and there were things that Discord did differently that didn't seem as smooth. We didn't fully switch from Telegram to Discord until 2020.

Since then, the Discord server has grown rapidly with a channel for each unit, a swathe of general channels, off topic channels, and more. At the end of May 2024, we had 141 roles and 1,529 members though not nearly all of those had ever even signed up to be TIE Corps members.

We've asked units not to create their own servers because we want pilots to be able to enjoy everything in one server instead of having to join up with multiple servers and then stop paying attention to all of them. At first there didn't seem to be any harm in permitting units to run their own servers, but over time the drawbacks become apparent.

Each battlegroup initially had its own voice channel(s) and this led to complaints that pilots were "hiding" in their unit's channel. We overhauled this and made it so that all the unit-based voice chats were publicly visible though only joinable with the right unit role.

Battlegroup Commanders didn't originally have the ability to create channels beyond the default general BG channel and were expected to contact the TCCOM for any new additions. After some consideration, BGCOMs were granted that permission and can now create channels for their battlegroups.

Opt-in channels were developed as a way to keep the channel list manageable though the drawback is that channels exist that a member might not be aware of. The hope is that the #role-assignments channel lays them out well enough to be noticeable.