Academy proposal

A fleet that almost everyone seems to remember fondly, but was disbanded in May 2003.

New Academy Plan

Make Beginner's Path the requirement for the first 2 promotions, up to 2Lt.
Cadets can still play any game and fly in any fleet, earn their MCw/H medals, etc., but can't be promoted anywhere until they have gotten to 2Lt in the Path.
Make certain things required to be promoted in the Path, such as taking an entry academy course (heh..not multiple choice), reading the bylaws, and operations manual.
The Training Office handles Beginner's Path, oversees the fleets' TOs to make sure they all have reasonable requirements and are performing well, and is available for any RS-wide questions.
This

Reinstate the Academy fleet, just as it was.
Bring back groups like Grey-Alpha that have a few people who are expert in one or more particular games, and will fly missions and participate along with the cadets.
Put control over who runs the academies to the Academy CO, instead of the individual fleets' COs.
This proposal gives back the idea of "your first home in the RS", but also doesn't let you join a fleet and start participating with it right away. That may be somewhat realistic in IC terms, but it would seem that it would be good to let people start participating in the regular way as soon as they want to.

Ask new members to select a primary genre of games to sign up on, so that they only join one fleet at the beginning, and have less to deal with if they would have otherwise signed up with a lot of games.
Have the Training Office maintain a staff of instructors who each specialize in a game, or preferably a genre, and one of these is automatically assigned to each new member by the DB based on the genre the cadet selected.
This instructor will be the cadet's go-to person, and needs to understand everything about Beginner's Path, as well as the requirements of the game(s) the cadet has selected for that genre.
The cadet will immediately enter into the fleet they selected upon joining.
This approach depends heavily on having good instructors, and a good TO to make sure everything is maintained properly.
The cadets would be able to select one of the initial following genres:
- Newer flight sims (XvT, XWA)
- Older flight sims (XW, TIE)
- MMORPG (SWG)
- Newer FPS (RC, BF2, BF)
- Older FPS (JA, JO, JK)
- Strategy (EaW)
- Writing (AF)
- Roleplaying (ABG)
The disadvantage here is that units like PBF probably wouldn't see a lot of influx, as people don't seem likely to choose "older flight sims" over "newer flight sims", for instance.