TCCOM:TIE Corps FAQ
Herein lie the answers to questions that have arisen from time to time so that pilots can potentially find and read them without having to ask and also so that pilots can know the "official" version of these answers.
Email in the TIE Corps
Q: What happened to the mailing list?
A: I pulled the plug on the Google Group. I didn't delete it, but I stopped adding or removing people and I made it to where non-admins can't send things to it for distribution.
Now, that doesn't mean we're done with email. We still need to be able to reach pilots if they're not on Discord, notifications only make sense to be via email, and I'm not opposed to leaders sending out whatever they want using the BCC lists that the site can generate. I don't feel strongly enough about it to mandate it, because if I tug on that string then I feel like I'd need to mandate a report schedule and I don't wanna.
Key concern is that more and more people have "moved on" from email, so it didn't seem to be worth the extra effort of CMDR+ figuring out how to send HTML reports and worrying about whether they want to "bother" the entire TC with their squadron reports.
And the Google Group in particular was an extra set of admin steps that Clark and I were taking because they couldn't be automated at all so we weren't sad to let those go. The BCC lists automatically update based on anything that happens on the roster, which is great.
TIE Corps Structure
Q: Why are squadrons groups of 12?
A: The biggest reason is that they always have been, all the way back to the very beginning of the TIE Corps in Alpha Squadron under then-GN Ronin. When we tested 16, the feedback was that it wasn't helpful and caused more confusion than it was worth, so our testing squadrons moved back down to 12.
Q: When are Wing Commanders and Commodores coming back?
A: When we think there's a strong need to take pilots who probably would've been CMDRs and make them WCs and COMs instead. Right now, a BGCOM coordinating 5 or 6 squadrons is working for us. More help is more help, for sure, but it's always the squadrons that bear the cost of having pilots taken from them so we're hesitant to do that until we think we have to.
Squadron Hierarchy
Q: Does the SQXO have to be in the 2-1 spot?
A: No because the site will let us put a SQXO in 3-1, but we like the uniformity of having the SQXOs in the 2-1 spot and the FL in 3-1 across the roster. If a CMDR came up with a good reason to have the SQXO in 3-1, we'd entertain the idea.
Discord
Q: We don't we have a channel with a bot that plays music?
A: They're not legal. Until somebody like YouTube, Apple, or Spotify makes a bot that would almost certainly require a monthly payment to have on a server, nobody has permission to play music to a group of people without having an agreement with the rights holders in some way.
Q: Why is #jv-officer-chat called that?
A: It's the "junior varsity" version of the CMDR+ channel because it's for FL+. It's a funny name that I came up with on the fly. While there's been a suggestion to change it, most are happy with the name and having to explain it once in a while is okay. There's nothing stopping any channel name from being questioned like #plifs-asteroid-bar-and-grill, so we write channel descriptions to clarify. If somebody doesn't read the channel description, that's not our fault ;)
