Founded in January of 2006, Shack Tactical is more than just a group of people who come together to play ArmA2. It is a community of like-minded gamers who want to experience a level of gameplay above what is possible in most other games, or on public servers. It is a group that cares about tactics, realism, authentic simulated combat, and serious fun. We know that quality surpasses quantity any day of the week, and twice on Saturdays, and we each do our part to ensure that the group as a whole, and the experiences we have in it, are the best they can possibly be. Many of us pour a great amount of time and energy into maintaining the group, providing feedback for it, organizing the sessions, creating missions, suggesting missions, and so on and so forth. We find that the effort pays off with some of the most memorable gaming experiences we've ever had. I personally have never had more fun in any online game than what I've had with ShackTac in OFP, ArmA, and now ArmA2/Arrowhead. Hopefully this page helps you to get a feel for whether it's the kind of group you're looking for.
To all of those reading this - best of luck to you in your ArmA endeavors, whether we end up crossing paths or not!
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 fun”.
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 + Operation Arrowhead and the ACE2 mod, along with the ACRE radio simulation 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 helped to cultivate, and more recently by our own in-house ShackTac Mission Framework (STMF) that we use.
Our group principles are the defining facets of what makes our group as solid as it is. Some highlights of these principles follow.
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!
The technical aspects are simple - anyone can download a few programs 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:
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. We also have Wednesday sessions at 7pm local, and tend to play various other games at other times throughout the week.
Finally, our detailed technical requirements are currently as follows:
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 played”, 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 way”. 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.com ) 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.
The process of joining ShackTac starts with you sending me an e-mail at dslyecxi@gmail.com, giving me a rundown of who you are, your age, how you found the group, and why you'd like to join. Bear in mind that the quality of the e-mail will be your first impression on me and by association the group itself, so if you are serious and would like a shot at joining us, you're best off taking some time and writing a good e-mail and not just a "Hey, I want to join, let me in" blurb.
Your e-mail needs to have a subject line that starts with [ShackTac Join Inquiry] followed by your in-game nick. This allows me to sort the incoming e-mails more easily, and it's an appreciated courtesy. You'll usually receive follow-on information via e-mail within a week or two that will tell you the steps you'll need to take to complete your request to join. If you do not receive a followup e-mail, feel free to ask me again after three or four weeks - we get a lot of applications and sometimes they get overlooked.
Note again that ShackTac is centered around the CST/CDT timezone (GMT -6/-5, you can see our current time here) and all potential members must be able to frequently participate in the primary sessions which occur each Saturday starting at 5pm local.
In addition to that, ShackTac is an active-participation group that has activity expectations in the form of IRC attendance, forum contribution, etc. While we tend to play ArmA2 primarily during our Saturday sessions, we also spend a lot of time interacting within the community in other games throughout the week, as well as simply 'shooting the breeze' with each other in Teamspeak, IRC, Skype, etc. Those who are interested in a strictly casual experience will be better served by other communities - while we catered to that somewhat in the early years, the present ShackTac group is oriented around gamers who are interested in becoming part of a tightly-knit, mature community that is about more than just having a good time in ArmA each Saturday.
Also remember that personal skill has almost no relevance to your acceptance in the group, so don't worry if you're not a crack shot or haven't played at our level of teamwork before - who you are as a person is far more important! We're looking for good people with good attitudes who can add value to our community. Skill can be taught; attitude, for the most part, is a personality trait that cannot be altered by us.
If you're a good person, and you're looking for a quality group where words like camaraderie, teamwork, and esprit-de-corps have a sincere and deeply rooted meaning, ShackTac should be right up your alley.
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 guy”. 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.
Footage from our 2011 year-end compilation video can be viewed below
If you'd lke to see more, here's a good one recapping 2010 for us.
Due to a variety of factors, it is rare that I update this page with recent videos and screens of ShackTac experiences. We keep most of our after-action reports, screens, video, etc content within our forums, which are member-only. However, it is still possible to view a lot of our media (albeit frequently without context) via a few specific resources.
For myself, you can find my Youtube page here. Feel free to subscribe to it if you'd like notifications of future video additions. I read all the comments to the videos as well.
I try to make session galleries as often as possible. You can find the full set, from our founding to now, in a nice gallery format here.
Every once in awhile I make a new AAR for my site. The most recent one is The Airborne Invasion of North Sahrani.
ArmA2 Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures - The crown jewel of ShackTac resources, this massive guide details all sorts of tactical goodness as applied to ArmA2.
You can also find some screens, videos, and links concerning our past Operation Flashpoint experiences here.
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The TrackIR is a 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) head-tracking device that allows you to control your in-game view via natural head movements, scaled up to requires as much or as little movement as you want. If you'd like to see a video demo of the TrackIR5 in ArmA2, check this out.
I highly recommend looking into getting one of these if you're interested in ArmA2 or flight sims and driving games in general.
You really won't find any other upgrades out that will improve gaming immersion as dramatically as this.
