Shack Tactical - Serious Fun!

[dslyecxi 23]

Greetings! What follows is a bit of text describing a group that I am very proud of - Shack Tactical. It's important to note that this is the very first time we've created such a topic about our group in the BIS forums, and I figure I'll take a moment to briefly explain why I decided to take this step. ShackTac has been around for over five years now - our founding date was January 4th of 2006 - and in that time we have gone through a tremendous evolution, taking us from a humble start to where we find ourselves now. Over that time, members have found their way to us through a variety of means - word of mouth, my tactical guides, our videos, etc - but we have never had anything resembling a "recruitment" post, aside from my own Shack Tactical site. So, what the hell, right? Time to lay it out and make our accessibility a bit more obvious! We're not nearly as intimidating as some believe. ;)

What is ShackTac all about?

Our mentality is best summed up with two words: Serious Fun. The "serious" reflects our emphasis on game-adapted, rooted-in-realism tactics, techniques, and procedures, as well as our maturity and collective attitude, while the "fun" stands toe-to-toe with it to ensure that everything we do is oriented towards making the most enjoyable experience possible for our memberbase.

To go into a bit more detail, allow me to quote from my interview with CharlieFoxtrot about our playstyle.

Generally speaking, our missions revolve around infantry combat, without many supporting assets or fancy weapons. We stick to a platoon structure that has every player using a weapon with a reflex or ironsight optic – magnified optics are very, very rare to see. Our anti-tank assets typically are AT4s and SMAWs, with Javelins being incredibly rare. In short, we like a tough fight, and we equip ourselves accordingly. When we have air support, it’s often in the form of something basic like an AH-6 or a Blackhawk with an M240 on it. We generally avoid stronger air assets, and when they are employed, they’re done so in careful moderation to ensure that the infantry gets a tough fight without the air “stealing all the funâ€.

ShackTac members aren’t looking for easy, pat-yourself-on-the-back scenarios that use endless respawns to ensure that defeat can never happen. We’re always looking for hard fights, and we want our triumphs to be earned through skill, determination, and the proper coordinated application of infantry tactics at the platoon level. If we don’t play at the top of our games, we expect to be defeated. Any defeats we suffer are their own special type of fun, and apart from entertaining us as we spectate the remainder of our platoon getting chopped to bits in a brutal mission, they also inspire to do better next time, refine our tactics, and learn from our mistakes to ensure that we’re a better team because of it.

We play no-respawn scenarios as a rule, though we have experimented with limited respawns in creative ways that attempt to resolve the issues that we feel exist with respawn as a general concept. So far they’ve been quite successful, though we expect no-respawn to remain as our primary play method for the foreseeable future.

As far as mission variety goes – we play all sorts of different types of scenarios. Our typical playercount is from 50-70 players, so we have a lot of flexibility in what type of scenarios we craft, whether intended for coop or adv. All of our scenario development is done in-house, and at last count we had over 650 ShackTac-developed ArmA1 missions on our server.

Our coops can come in a wide variety of flavors – from heliborne ops to convoys, platoon attacks, raids, defenses, etc, along with all sorts of other types. Adversarial scenarios show even more variety, as we’re able to take advantage of the human-vs-human dynamics to get extremely creative with objectives, scenario concepts, etc. We take full advantage of ArmA’s VON system and have developed a myriad number of scenarios that integrate it into the mission dynamics.

A good example of the kind of creative and unique experiences our playerbase gets in our gaming can be found in the “Paradrop!†AAR I wrote up in early 2008.

Since the time of writing that, we have transitioned fully to ArmA2 and the ACE2 mod, and have begun building an impressive catalog of in-house missions for ourselves. Old favorites have returned, along with a wide variety of new ideas. The mission designers of our group continue to evolve and grow, aided in large part by the F2 Mission Framework that we help to cultivate.

Principles of ShackTac

Our group principles are the defining facets of what makes our group as solid as it is. Some highlights of these principles follow.

• Community is the key. There are many places you can go to to play ArmA and have fun. However, if you're looking for something higher to tie it all together, that's where our emphasis on our community development and interaction comes into play.
  
• Teamwork, Maturity, and Integrity combined with a Quality-over-Quantity mindset. We hold our members to high standards of conduct, and the group experience benefits immensely in turn.
  
• Active community participation & interaction - the more you put into it, the more you get back. We aren't in this to accumulate a roster of players who never actually play - if you join us, expect to see an active community that is regularly culled to remove any deadweight that might accumulate.
  
• Esprit-de-corps brought on by a rich history of camaraderie, evolution, and achievement. We are proud of where we came from and what we have accomplished, and this esprit-de-corps adds a great depth of character to the group itself.
  
• Well-defined tactics, techniques, and procedures, with a group-level comprehension and proficiency of them. Our goal is to maintain a high level of tactical gameplay without having to resort to "drill sessions" or other tedious trainings. You'll have our tactical guide as reference, which you are encouraged to learn as you play, and over time you'll see it all be put into good use in our sessions, with your own tactical proficiency and understanding increasing naturally, through enjoyable and intense gameplay.
  
• Motivated leaders leading dedicated troops. We strive for a high degree of competency in our playerbase insofar as leadership goes, as well as pride ourselves on how well our non-leading players will follow orders and conduct themselves in any given mission. Opportunities for leadership are plentiful, both at the start of the mission in the form of platoon commanders, squad leaders, fireteam leaders, and special group leaders, as well as in-mission resulting from casualties (and believe me, we are not invincible - you will definitely get to step up to a leadership billet at some point from casualties). You will find that a ShackTac team will follow you without hesitation into even the most absurdly "virtually dangerous" situations, as we're all in it for a good time, and a glorious virtual death can be a hell of a lot of fun!
  
• "No Bullshit" mentality. Bring a foul attitude into the group or otherwise behave in an undesirable way and you can expect to see yourself shown the door. The group trumps the individual, and toxic attitudes are simply not tolerated.
  

Hopefully that gives you a good idea of where we're coming from. That's only part of the picture, of course - when it comes to applicants, who you are is of great importance as well!

What makes a good ShackTac member?

The technical aspects are simple - anyone can download a few programs (Skype, IRC, Teamspeak) and install them, after all. If it were that easy to be a member, however, the group would never have amounted to anything. The real meat of it comes in our expectations from our playerbase. In keeping with our views of "Quality over quantity", we are happy to sort through a dozen or more applicants to find a single quality player. We are pretty selective in who we bring onboard, and the quality of our playerbase and gameplay is a testament to this.

When it comes to reviewing applications, as well as observing the conduct of our probationary "pre-FNG" (aka 'pFNG') members, there are many things that we key in on. Some of the most important of those values are as follow:

• Friendly, respectful, and mature.
  
• Good sense of humor.
  
• Eager to learn and grow as a player.
  
• Teamwork-oriented mindset.
  
• Honest and accountable for their actions.
  
• Motivated and dedicated to making the group and our experiences the best they can be.
  
• In it for the "long haul" - flavor-of-the-week players need not apply.

You'll note that "skill" does not appear on that list - skill can be taught, after all! Who you are as a person is of far more importance to us - we look for good people with good attitudes who can add real value to our community. Attitude and personality are traits that we have little chance of molding online, and we simply do not have time to deal with people who exhibit bad behavior or sportsmanship from the outset.

Also note that we are centered around the CST/CDT timezone (GMT -6/-5), and expect our members to participate in our primary Saturday sessions which occur each Saturday starting at 5pm local.

A partial group photo at the start of a Saturday session

ShackTac & The Rest of the Community

My views on the community-at-large were summed up thusly in the above-mentioned CharlieFoxtrot interview - I'm quoting it here, as I believe it succinctly conveys the idea.

...we enjoy seeing how other groups approach the game. We have our own thoughts on “how it’s meant to be playedâ€, but recognize that everyone is entitled to interpret the game however they want, and we’re not arrogant enough to think that our way is “the only right wayâ€. We’re certainly proud of what we’ve accomplished, and are happy to share thoughts on what has worked for us, what hasn’t, etc, in order to help others avoid mistakes that we’ve learned from in the past.

The great thing about the ArmA community is that it offers something for pretty much everyone – from hardcore milsim groups to totally casual experiences, as well as everything in between. We occupy what we would call the “serious fun†side of that scale – we’re not stuffy or rigid in how we play, we know that it’s all a game at the end of the day, and we’re all in it to have a good time. Our sessions – typically lasting eight hours or so of non-stop gaming – reflect this mentality as well, with us playing a wide variety of serious and not-so-serious missions throughout.

We are generally receptive to joint gaming arrangements, though we do approach them carefully and are not prone to rushing into something simply for the sake of doing it. If you would like to see about setting something up between us and your group, feel free to get in touch via e-mail (dslyecxi, gmail) or forum PM. We can field from 50-70 players depending on the date, time of year, and so forth, or less if technical reasons demand it. ;)

Want to know more?

If you'd like to know more or are interested in joining us, check out the ShackTac site. It contains information about joining us as well as videos and screens of us in action.

Finally, for those wondering what it's like from the eyes of a new player, here's a quote from one of our members who joined in 2009, giving his views on his time in the group up to that point:

I originally came to ShackTac (in June of this year) so I could play Arma and Arma 2 in a large-scale, well-organized, team-based, environment. I felt playing in a community like Shack Tactical would be the best way to get the most out of the Arma games/simulators. I haven’t been let down in my experiences thus far. In fact, my in-game experiences with ShackTac have exceeded my lofty expectations.

I stay committed to ShackTac because I truly enjoy the interaction with the members. My personal experiences with the people of ShackTac have been nothing but positive. Coming into the group as a pFNG, I expected at least some level of clique-ishness to be present … I figured that would be inevitable with such a large group. I expected a somewhat lengthy ‘break-in†period in which I would be treated as what I was --- a “new guyâ€. In reality, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The members were very welcoming and helpful. Several members went out of their way to assist me with some early technical difficulties. I credit the leaders of ShackTac for fostering a welcoming environment for new joins.

To all of those viewing this - best of luck to you in your ArmA endeavors, whether we cross paths or not!

Edited January 4, 2011 by Dslyecxi

[dslyecxi 23]

Figured I'd post a quick update here. Earlier today we ran a joint session with LDD Kyllikki which ended up peaking at around 75 players and lasted several hours, including one coop mission and various adversarials as well. Good showing to everyone from LDDK who attended, it was fun stuff. :)

ShackTac and LDDK assembled for the requisite photo op. Click for bigger version.

In other news, it's been neat to see how this ST BIS forum topic has been received, as we've had a good influx of applicants resulting from it and their quality has been high. As always, if you're interested in the type of experience we're shooting for, you're welcome to apply.

To those that are interested in future joint ops, you're welcome to contact us as well. Along those lines, we have an even bigger event planned for late June, details will be forthcoming as we get closer to it... should be a ton of fun, though. :)

[dslyecxi 23]

On the 27th ShackTac and TacticalGamer got together for a joint adversarial session, fielding a total of 107 players in the first mission played.

Several hours were spent gaming through a series of adversarial missions in which TG/ST players intermingled on both sides. Despite the high playercount, the session went off with very few technical issues - rather impressive considering the 100+ head count!

When all was said and done, good times were had, and the foundation was successfully laid for more such events in the future. Thanks to all who participated and helped to make it such a successful event. :)

[dslyecxi 23]

What's new in the world of ShackTac?

Moving to Arrowhead

As part of our Arrowhead testing, our 'vanilla Arrowhead' Saturday session on the 24th saw us field a peak of 62 ShackTac players, with the session lasting about eight hours in total. Things went quite well and we had a great time trying out new Arrowhead features, terrains, etc - in the end, it gave our staff confidence that moving to Arrowhead was a viable option as of that moment.

Post-session, we established a 'Combined Arms' setup to include the new ACE as well as carrying over our prior terrains and misc mods. 'Combined Arms' is now a group requirement and will be what we play all future sessions with.

ShackTac Fireteam HUD Updated

We released a new version of the ShackTac HUD on the 15th, adding Arrowhead and TrackIR support to the mod.

ACRE Testing

ACRE testing has been happening, though we've taken a break with the public release in order to work on our Arrowhead transition. Now that we've accomplished it, we'll be back at ACRE, with a plan to fully adopt the mod once 1.1 is released and the functionality we're desiring is implemented

Some footage from our ACRE testing follows:

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Joint Gaming Plans

After the last successful joint op with TacticalGamer.com, we're working on getting another one together. ACRE and Arrowhead have delayed this somewhat - once the dust from both have settled, we'll have something ready to go.

New Joins

We continue to have a very high application rate, and from those, have welcomed a large number of new players into the group. There's always room for more, too - if you can uphold our standards and commit to our participation expectations, you're welcome to apply as well. The more, the merrier. :)

[dslyecxi 23]

We just released our movement addon to the public, you can find more information on it in this thread. It's quite a nice change for CQB, amongst other things. Enjoy! :)

[dslyecxi 23]

You can find a nice ShackTac MH-6 training mission over in this thread. Video preview below.

7ThNyR_fY0M

[dslyecxi 23]

Today ShackTac celebrates it's fifth anniversary. As part of our recognition of this, I've put together a page of images used in our internal discussion of the year's events - you can find it here. Some examples follow.

If you've been looking for a group that's been there, done that, has the t-shirts, is composed of great people, and has every intention of sticking around for a good long time, look no further. :cool:

First, though, an incredibly well-done video by our own CHkilroy, showing off footage from the year's games. HD definitely recommended!

rMihe33GCNw

Edited January 5, 2011 by Dslyecxi

[dslyecxi 23]

What's new in the world of ShackTac?

2011 has opened strong for us, with a large quantity of applications resulting in a good influx of prospective members. Our sessions have been going strong, showing peak playercounts in the 60's, with one particular session hitting a 76 player peak as we introduced the excellent Capraia island to our addon set. Gameplay remains varied and entertaining, with a mix of cooperative and adversarial gametypes allowing for a solid session pacing to be maintained. All in all, things are going good - new blood, some old faces returning to the mix, and lots of fun gaming both in and out of ArmA.

If you've been wanting to join a group that can give you quality, large-scale, and consistently enjoyable gaming on a regular schedule both in and out of ArmA, check us out. I doubt you'll be disappointed.

And, finally, one of our members - Jive - put together a fantastic compilation of footage from 2011 so far. Definitely recommend HD for this one.

gcwzuiuc_EE

[dslyecxi 23]

What's new in the world of ShackTac?

Things are rolling along as usual in the group. We continue to have a steady influx of players applying, and are also working on a few joint sessions - one coming up next month, and the next likely a month or so after that. More info on those once they've happened and we have some video/screens to post. We're also once again looking at ACRE for our comm needs, and have some plans in place to adopt it as soon as a few lingering API features are implenmted. Many thanks to Nou and Jaynus for their efforts in all things ACRE, as well as their patience in dealing with frequent API and feature requests. ;)

We've also just moved server providers to Jestservers, on one of their dedicated server offerings. The end result of this is an overall faster server, able to host more than enough server instances to suit all of our ArmA gaming/testing needs, as well as potentially anything else we might want to dedi it up with. It smells nice, too.

In video news, chKilroy recorded a recent anti-tank training session put on by our own Bricks. It's a lengthy video that goes into detail on all sorts of anti-tank stuff, as it applies to the ACE mod. You can find it embedded below, though I'd recommend popping it out into a new tab to watch in HD.

SEIeEG7ttKI

As always, if you're interested in joining, check out the ShackTac site for more info.

[dslyecxi 23]

Today found us playing a joint session with the Ukranian Tactical Gaming (UTG), in which we did a series of ST-vs-UTG adversarials. It was pretty epic all around, and when we found ourselves attacking the below monster, well... it got a bit bloody!

I took some footage of that particular mission, created by UTG. You can find it below - hires is recommended for maximum "Wow, that was close!" immersion.

J4b0314X8w0

Many thanks to everyone who participated from UTG, we had a great time and you were wonderful people to fight against. I think we ended up in the mid-70's for playercount and it was a blast (often quite literally) from start to finish. Definitely have to do it again sometime.

[dslyecxi 23]

Over the past months, ShackTac has made the transition over into an ACRE-based community, joining many other communities in the belief that ACRE's VON fidelity makes it a necessity for good teamwork and gameplay.

I've picked a few examples of recent videos showing off our ACRE usage as well as our general gameplay. This first one is an adversarial mission where Russian heliborne troops are assaulting several suspected insurgent locations. This is the third LZ they've done so far, and it just so happens that my insurgent team is waiting in the hills, watching them come in for a landing, holding our fire in the hopes that they will commit to the landing...

The next video is a coop mission called 'Quick & Dirty'. In this, we're fighting our way to a factory compound, from which we plan to call in a helo extract. Things do not go quite according to plan, and we find ourselves in a long, crazy firefight.

All in all, it's business as usual in ShackTac. We're always open to new members, just take a look at our site and send me an inquiry if interested. :)

Edited June 15, 2012 by Dslyecxi

[dslyecxi 23]

October finds ShackTac making the transition from ol' faithful Yoma's AddonSync over to Sickboy's 6updater program for our mod distribution. YAS has served us well for years, but as the times change, it seems inevitable that 6updater is the way to go for us. Many thanks to Yoma for YAS and his past efforts and support, as well as to Sickboy for both his program and his ever-chipper support and enthusiasm for his projects.

Aside from this, we've been doing some training events lately - one of them is posted below, showing a Fireteam Leadership course hosted October 2nd by Bricks & assistants. This event was a fun way to give some aspiring and current leaders a way to develop and refine their skills, reinforce the good habits, and correct the bad ones. It went quite well, and CHKilroy put together a video of it for the benefit of those unable to attend - both in and out of ShackTac. It's about an hour and a half long, but if you're looking for some good leadership tips and examples of how to conduct interesting and engaging training, it should entertain.

Then of course we have stuff like this next clip, showing a slice of the kind of high-intensity engagements we're so fond of getting into - perfect opportunities to practice the sorts of skills gained in the above training.

Like what you see and want to know more? Check out our site, where you can find joining instructions & prerequisites, session galleries, and more.

Edited June 15, 2012 by Dslyecxi

[dslyecxi 23]

Another year and ShackTac's still tickin' - today marks our sixth anniversary as a group, whee! :cool:

If you're looking for a group where the community experience is paramount and your personality means more than your tactical proficiency, ShackTac is the group for you. When we say 'serious fun', it's more than just a catchy tag - it's an ethos that we strive to maintain and refine year after year. If you want the ultimate in hardcore milsim, look elsewhere - that's not our thing. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a community atmosphere that is second-to-none, with "where it matters" pragmatic, no-nonsense tactics adopted from our detailed TTP2 - step right up and apply. :)

I've put together a page of images used in our internal discussion of the year's events - accessible here.

Our own CHKilroy has once again made a fantastic video recap of the year - HD recommended as always:

Edited June 15, 2012 by Dslyecxi

[dslyecxi 23]

Nearly halfway through 2012, ShackTac continues strong. Our most recent Saturday event saw us hitting 80 players peak, and recent events have seen us onboarding even more new members than usual at this time of the year. It's quite an exciting time for us, and with A3 on the horizon, the future is looking even brighter.

If you're curious to know what we've been doing recently, let's check out a few samples. First, we released the Littlebird Enhancement Mod recently, adding a bunch of new enhancements and features to my personal favorite airframe.

We also had a fun time with DayZ, the fantastic zombie-survival mod that has since exploded onto the scene.

(and continuing for six parts so far).

We've kept to our principles of 'Serious Fun' and have ended up with some great experiences thanks to it. Many of them have been recorded by our own CHKilroy, session videographer extraordinaire, while many others have picked up notable highlights as well.

Some were serious.

Some... less so.

Others... well, we don't always like to talk about the others... :)

As always, our doors remain open to those willing to live up to the standards and ideals that we've established and refined over the years. You need only check out our site for joining information.

If you've been searching for a community with minimum drama and maximum entertainment, packed full of great members who have been around for years, happy to bring in new people wherever they hail from, look no further. :)

Edited June 15, 2012 by Dslyecxi

[dslyecxi 23]

Thanks in a significant part to DayZ's influence on the scene, ShackTac continues to grow in numbers. We've recently seen a peak of 117 players in one of our sessions, and hit the 100+ player mark regularly on Saturdays and even often on Wednesday sessions now. The situation we find ourselves in as a group currently is, in a word, awesome - and as always, I want to share our experiences out of pride at what we've accomplished.

I have always been a fan of showing a community by the content that they actually play, instead of making staged cinematic videos that don't show anything real. In light of this, I've started spending a bit more time recording missions that ShackTac plays. These are my three most recent ones, each an unscripted, typical ShackTac event. The first two are from a Wednesday "pre-FNG" session, in which we on-board new members and give other members chances to try new roles and responsibilities, while the third - Nomads - is just a random during-the-week impromptu lower-playercount mission.

As always, you can find more about us at my site. Six and a half years strong and still growing. :)

Edited June 15, 2012 by Dslyecxi

[dslyecxi 23]

Adversarial Gaming

One of the things that sets ShackTac apart from many other ArmA groups is the fact that we play far more than just coop - in fact, we're stacked about 70-80% in favor of adversarial player-vs-player missions, with the remainder being coop. Thus, the tactics we use are employed against thinking, reacting enemies, and not just rigid and generally inflexible AI. The intensity of these high-playercount (100+) adversarials is incredible, and I picked a few examples from our recent gaming to show this:

You can find a great many recent ShackTac videos on my channel as well - dozens having been added over the last months.

Recent Coop

We also do some pretty killer coop!

Dslyecxi's Blog

Also, I've started a blog where I field questions about our gaming, ShackTac, myself, etc - if interested, you can find it here.

The Delayed Entry Program

Finally, due to the insane demand we're having currently, we've implemented a new 'delayed entry program' for prospective joins. You can read some about that here.

Thanks to everyone who has shown interest and participated in our gaming over the years, and here's to another six and a half years of ShackTac. :)

As always, you can find more about us at the ShackTac site.

Edited August 13, 2012 by Dslyecxi