Creator / Shack Tactical

THIS. IS. SHACKTACCC!!

Serious fun

— Shack Tactical's motto

Shack Tactical (or "ShackTac") is a dedicated gaming community that posts videos of multi-player sessions in military simulator games, particluarly ArmA (although they occasionally post videos from other games as well). ShackTac members are hand-picked, and are known for maintaining remarkable discipline, while at the same time keeping a very friendly and oftentimes humorous atmosphere. As their motto states, ShackTac's appeal lies equally in both these aspects.

In ArmA, ShackTac runs large-scale operations (some videos may contain upwards of 100 players), with very organized teamwork and intricately-designed combat missions. They tend to use more low-tech equipment, forgoing fancy equipment and heavy vehicle support in favor of tougher, closer-range fights than the game potentially allows. Missions can vary greatly from one another, ranging from lighthearted fun to truly nightmarish scenarios.

The team has had thousands of active members over the years, though only a handful actually post their videos online. Some, but not all of its members are ex-military. You probably know them from these six:

• Dslyecxi, the group founder. Dslyecxi's been around since the earliest days of the ArmA series, and has posted the most ShackTac videos by a wide margin. Besides leading the group, he's written a popular and very elaborate Tactics, Techniques, & Procedures guide, and now makes official videos for ArmA 3 and other Bohemia Interactive products.
• Beagle (aka. Beaglerush) is a player from Sydney, Australia who held a key position in the group, and made many video uploads over the years. Beagle left Shack Tactical in early 2015, and is now more known for his popular XCOM: Enemy Unknown live-streams. Beagle's girlfriend, Jamball, was also a member of ShackTac for a few years.
• CHkilroy, a Californian with a penchant for video/audio editing and a wacky, off-key approach to the game. He's still one of the most prolific uploaders of the group, despite having taken several long breaks from ShackTac over the last few years.
• Taconic is currently one of the main administrators for ShackTac, handling a variety of tasks connected to running the ShackTac community. Hailing from the American northeast, Taconic enjoys witty banter and foreign cultures (Scottish and Oceanic, specifically), and has the ears of a fox. He often posts videos of himself and other Shackers playing other, non-shooter multiplayer games together.
• Jive is a pilot in real life, which explains his skill at flying and his unwavering calm voice. Jive has also posted a good number of videos from the DCS series, where he flies a variety of aircraft.
• BlackDragon

With their rise in popularity within and outside the ArmA community, the number of applications to join ShackTac has risen as well. ShackTac members are accepted on the basis of constant review; not to see whether they are skilled players, but whether they fit well into the ShackTac community. Members must be 18 or older - among many other requirements.

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Examples:

• Accidental Aiming Skills: In One in a Million, as Dslyecxi offloads some troops into a hot LZ, an AI soldier fires an RPG at the helicopter, but instead hits Ghostboots.
  YouTube comment: "RIP lone infantry man. You will be mist."
• The Ace: Although all Shackers are, at the end of the day, exceptionally skilled players of ARMA, Dslyecxi often demonstrates that he is the most skilled player in the group. He displays the technical skills of playing ARMA in a variety of different roles, shows a depth of tactical and even strategic understanding of combat situations, and has clearly demonstrated his skill in maintaining a complex community like Shack Tactical in the first place. Within the context of ShackTac videos, Dslyecxi's skills sometimes surprise even longtime members, who occasionally attribute it to some sort of magical power that he must possess. Of particular note is Dslyecxi's ability to fly helicopters under the most intense pressure, to always leave his mark on the battlefield, and of course to manipulate people and situations to his advantage. Many of the other trope examples listed here refer to the variety of ways in which Dslyecxi demonstrates The Ace trope.
• Ace Pilot:
  • Dslyecxi is this with helicopters, and in particular the M/AH-6 "Littlebird" - a small and quick helicopter used for scouting, transport of a handful of men, and/or Close Air Support against soft targets. He has flown many many hours on the Littlebird, and many of those hours have been featured in his and other Shackers' videos over the years.
    • In a short snippet called :clint:, Dslyecxi is seen flying really fast and low through the city of Fallujah, on the way to insert a new fireteam into a friendly-controlled landing zone. As he ascends to observe the LZ, a machine gun opens fire and hits the helicopter's engine with the very first burst. The engine shuts down, and the helicopter begins falling to the ground. Struggling with the stick, Dslyecxi swings away from the source of fire and begins to do his best to autorotate the helicopter into a safe landing spot. Halfway down to the ground, the helicopter is hit again by an RPG, which powerfully knocks it aside, threatening to crash it right into the trees and buildings below. Despite all of this, he manages to land it flawlessly.
    Dslyecxi: Oh HELL yeah! You fuckin' saw that!
    Passenger #1: That was fucking awesome!
    Passenger #2: That was badass.
    Dslyecxi: Welcome to Fallujah.
• Action Girl: Any female Shacker, but particularly CraneSong. She is often seen backing up Dslyecxi, whether on foot or as the gunner on whatever he happens to be flying.
• Advice Backfire:
  • At the start of FAC Tanoa, Dslyecxi (the Platoon Medic) advises Taconic (the FAC) that "if you happen to lose track of your medic, don't go back for him". This is in reference to the previous mission in the jungle (Can't Help Dead Men), where Dslyecxi (the FAC) did try to go back for the Platoon Medic and got himself killed. At the end of FAC Tanoa, Dslyecxi is shot, and Taconic decides to take his advice and leave him behind in the jungle.
    • Another borderline example occurs in the same video, where Taconic advises Morgan — the Platoon Leader — to continue on to the last objective of the mission instead of extracting from the combat zone, and even goads him into it a little. Only a few seconds later, Morgan is killed, Taconic inherits command of the platoon, and immediately decides to extract instead.
• All for Nothing:
  • After a short but intense fight on the bridge-top in Highwaymen, Dslyecxi decides to take his fireteam across the road and make an elaborate and brilliantly-executed flanking maneuver to take the enemy from behind by surprise. Everything works flawlessly - except for the fact that the enemy had already been whittled down to practically nothing, so Dslyecxi's team never got to fire a shot. This flanking maneuver spans nearly half the video, and is surprisingly interesting to watch.
  • In one of Dslyecxi's oldest videos, Kevb0 Never Leaves a Man Behind, Kevb0 assaults and hijacks a truck in order to try and save Kaider. He drives down a long road towards Kaider's location, keeping comms with him and trying to get him out of the town he's in for a pickup. Kaider is killed just as Kevb0 is about to reach him.
  • In Defense of Bar Kanday, Dslyecxi decimates an enemy assault team attempting to flank through his sector, killing quite a few. From his perspective it may seem like the defenders are going to hold, even though they've lost most of their men. Unfortunately, once we get to the post-death spectator view, we see the enemy win anyway, and with remarkably low casualties for them.
  • Enfailed is an Adversarial video where Dslyecxi plays a scout for his platoon, running around in the dense forest with an Enfield bolt-action rifle to seek the enemy's flanking unit and try to snipe at it. Throughout the video, he locates and shadows a large enemy element and engages it repeatedly from cover with pin-point accurate shots, firing a total of 7 bullets and hitting no fewer than 6 enemies squarely in the chest. At the end of the video, we learn that only one of them was actually killed. This is because the Enfield's .303 rounds were modeled very badly in ArmA 2.
• Alternate Universe: Alternate universes aren't exactly rare in multiplayer games, since a bug or server-lag can cause players' clients to become "desynchronized" from one another, creating two or more different instances of the same in-game reality. However Dslyecxi's Everything is Fine takes this to the next level when his helicopter is hit and loses its engine but his ArmA client doesn't get the memo. Since he's the one flying the helicopter, the server has no choice but to accept his "reality", allowing the helo to continue flying as normal. From everyone else's perspective however, the rotor has completely stopped rotating. (Which unnerves Dslyecxi's co-pilot CraneSong and the FAC watching this to no end). Dslyecxi eventually decides to collapse this quantum superposition; He goes silent and pretends to have been killed, in order to force Crane to take control of the helicopter. This would let them see if her "reality" would assert itself, and the helo would stop flying, or whether the computer's mix up would cause it to keep flying. Unfortunately, according to the conversation between Dslyecxi and Crane at the end of the video, Crane waited too long to take over, so by then the helicopter was so low it was virtually certain to crash no matter what.
• Arch-Enemy: Enemy snipers, for Dslyecxi. ShackTac almost never uses magnified optics, and hasn't employed sniper teams in years (for a variety of reasons that have been explained to death because people will never stop asking about them). When snipers are encountered however (especially in DayZ), Dslyecxi will make it a personal priority to hunt and kill the snipers himself, as a wake-up call.
  • Examples of this include What Dslyecxi Thinks of Snipers and The Art of Sniping.
  • Of course, there's also Inside the Mind of a Guerrilla Sniper, where Dslyecxi himself took the role, to show how it's supposed to be done.
• Artifact of Death:
  • Infantry transports have been gradually turning into this, at least in the eyes of the Shackers, due to the high likelihood of vehicles getting destroyed and killing everyone on board. This has reached a point where the troops will sometimes refuse to board a vehicle - even when directly ordered to do so - preferring to go on foot instead. In the past few years, this has saved the lives of many a fireteam, making those infantrymen justifiably Genre Savvy.
  • In Swamped Things Fracsid makes the mistake of attempting to get an anti-tank launcher off a dead enemy right on top of a rocky cliffside. As any ArmA player would know, this is a recipe for death.
    Fracsid (after respawn): I fought the LAW and the LAW won.
• Awesomeness Is a Force: Dslyecxi. His very presence visibly affects the others - whether they are friendly or enemy. This is particularly true if he's flying a Littlebird at the time.
• Badass Boast: During the fighting in DEAD Patrol, Jaroldo gets an RPG-7 with several HEDP rockets off a dead enemy, declaring himself to be "a total badass now". (Around 30:10) He lives up to the boast almost immediately, by scoring a one-shot deadly hit on an enemy M113 with a rocket. Then he finds a load of extra morphine and epinephrine for the squad. Later, Dslyecxi sarcastically refers to him as "Captain Badass" while goading him to move ahead to the next cover... and thus directly into the line of fire until Jaroldo reaches cover. Jaroldo is shot and nearly killed, but survives, prompting Dslyecxi to start talking about Jaroldo as if he really is "Captain Badass" and nothing can really kill him. (Around 39:00 in.) A few minutes later, when Dslyecxi hears that Jaroldo's finally been killed, he is audibly disheartened, and makes sure to put about ten extra bullets into the prone body of the guy who killed Jaroldo.
  Killoch: I'm sorry, Dslyecxi. Jaroldo's dead.
  Dslyecxi: What?! No! My Captain Badass! [Some time passes, then Dslyecxi looks at the corpse in the next room] Did that fucking dude get him?
  Killoch: Yeah.
  Dslyecxi: Ah, motherfucker. [Riddles the corpse with bullets]
• Badass Creed: "Serious Fun".
• Black Comedy: ShackTac aims for authenticity including treating the dangers of combat seriously. At the same time they are playing video games so more often than not death is treated with "darn it" and a laugh.
  • Stryker Delivery is an excellent example. Dslyecxi's squad watches from a distance as a Stryker takes a hit and is set on fire, when suddenly a crewman jumps out of the vehicle and burns to death. The squad reacts with equal parts laughter, being shaken up by how dark the event is, and back to making jokes about how it is seriously affecting them.
  • Dead on Location is the story of a news crew who went to have an interview with a military commander, only to be raided and taken hostage by terrorists - who co-opt the cameraman to film them doing an "ISIS execution" of that same commander. This is treated with absolutely no gravitas whatsoever.
  • Embedded with the Coast Guardsmen is a similar story featuring a news crew, which tags along with a military unit into combat - and is eventually subjected to a napalm attack, in which one reporter's face melts off while the other weeps hysterically. It's a non-stop comedy video.
  • Marg Bar Amrika, a round of Human Shield in which a group of Quraci locals shadow an American infantry unit, shouting all sorts of ridiculously stereotypical phrases at them (while the soldiers do their best not to perpetrate any war crimes), and eventually taking some of them out in a suicide bombing.
  • A Case for Body Cams. In this short video seen from Spectator mode, MGbait demonstrates the trope by murdering a pair of unarmed criminals, and then accusing their dead bodies of resisting arrest.
  • Officer Beagle, Beagle's persona whenever he plays a cop in The Game. Officer Beagle is pretty much the worst kind of police officer you would ever want to meet. If he stops any player on the road, there's a very high chance that he will execute them shortly thereafter, even if they've done nothing wrong. Occasionally, he may help that player kill his target first, and then kill him. Officer Beagle videos tend to be considered among the funniest in the ShackTac repertoire.
  • During the UAZ ride in Abosolute Madness, the passengers make jokes about Cappy's incredibly bad medical situation while he's unconscious in the front seat and bleeding to death after having been run over by an enemy vehicle.
    Ghostboots: If anyone wants to smother him with a pillow...
• Be Careful What You Say: If the Game Master happens to hear someone saying "That was easy!" or "Look how many of us have survived so far!", that player's entire unit should expect to encounter a considerably more serious challenge very soon afterwards.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: This philosophy has led Shackers to start using suicide-by-hand-grenade as a last resort against an encroaching zombie horde, in the Blackout missions. It's usually also a Taking You with Me moment, killing some of the zombies to improve the survival chances of the rest of the group.
• Blasé Boast: In Junkyard Apocalypse, Dslyecxi's littlebird suffers a bizarre engine failure in mid-air, which of course doesn't prevent Dslyecxi from landing the bird safely right next to friendlies. On the ground, he meets up with a couple of pilots who were downed earlier, and this exchange takes place:
  Other pilot: Was that you that exploded?
  Dslyecxi: Nah, I don't... I don't explode.
• Blatant Lies: Whenever someone does something bad. The lies are always deliberately transparent.
  • During Parapluie, CHKilroy stabs an AI-controlled civilian to death, claiming that the civilian had tried to grab his weapon. Needless to say, the AI is not programmed to do anything like that.
  • Also crops up frequently in The Game sessions.
    Beagle: I'LL SAVE YOU, TIMID! TIMID, I'LL SAVE YOU! [sets up jerry can so he can burn Timid Bun alive]
    • In Officer Beagle, Taconic succeeds in running Calgon over with his truck, in plain view of the cops. He quickly drives away, and is notified that his next target is Heti. He runs Heti off the road, but then the cops show up, and one of them asks about Taconic's truck.
      Officer Waffleman: Who exactly was driving the red truck?
      Taconic: Heti over there was.
      [Caption reads: "Blatantly lying"]
  • An Effective Checkpoint begins with Officer Beagle saying "Let's park our shit in the middle of the road and stop people from murdering". During this short video, he facilitates two murders.
    Officer Beagle: Ok, so who were you going to assassinate today?
    Mikey: That man, right there.
    Officer Beagle: Oh. Go ahead.
  • Everything Dslyecxi says during The Silver Briefcase, right up to the moment when he is finally rescued.
• Bolivian Army Ending:
  • Dslyecxi made one of these in Let Me Go Home.
  • At the end of ShackCops Returns, when Officer Beagle decides to try and disarm a satchel charge set up in a gas station.
    Beagle: You guys ever see The Hurt Locker? This is like the intro!
    Hippeus (from a safe distance): Didn't they explode in the intro?
    Beagle (disarming): No...
    [End of video]
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Dslyecxi does this every once in a while. In the middle of playing the mission he'll suddenly speak directly to the YouTube audience (the people who will eventually watch the video). He mostly comments on how bad his current situation is, on what's going through his mind, or on what his options might be. Interestingly, these comments serve to increase immersion rather than decrease it.
• Break the Badass: Dslyecxi doesn't often get scared or even worried, but when he does, you know the situation is bad.
  • While flying a Littlebird with the new realistic nightvision goggles in Low Lume Transport, Dslyecxi comments about the terrible visibility:
    Dslyecxi: See, this is great, because it actually makes me nervous while flying.
    Passenger: [laughs] That makes me more nervous!
• Bullet Dodge: Since the ballistics model of ArmA is fairly realistic, it's not uncommon to see near misses - and Shackers commenting on exactly how close the bullets came to killing them or others. But on occasion, actual divine intervention does occur.
  • In Dodging This, Dslyecxi literally dodges a burst from a machine gun, coming from half a mile away.
  • It is not exactly clear how CHKilroy survived Dslyecxi's Assassination Attempt. To see this from Kilroy's perspective, check out Assault MMG.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Although S.H.A.C.K.E.R missions are essentially zombie survival missions, the players will sometimes refer to them as "rioters" rather than "zombies", in keeping with the mission story. Of course, they're still very much zombies.
• Call-Back: Who Has the What? features multiple references to Dslyecxi's infamous "experiment" from Everything is Fine. Dslyecxi might have snuck in another one late in the video as well: while in the middle of being extracted, Dslyecxi quips that he still has 2 bullets left and maybe they should go back and fight the enemy some more, which brings to mind Dslyecxi's memorable 2015 video Two Bullets Away where Dslyecxi and Mally spend about a half hour alternating between fleeing and fighting the enemy after a mission goes disastrously wrong, and they were both down just two bullets left before they were extracted and taken to safety.
• Caption Humor: In Quiet Woodland Walk, Dslyecxi spells out Awoihjaweohr's name as "S-A-D-I-S-T-I-C B-A-S-T-A-R-D", while the on-screen caption spells it out as "AWOIHJAWEOHR >:|".
• The Cavalry: BLUFOR are supposed to be this during the Dark Business and Caesar Merlin missions. They are a small airborne infantry team, equipped with high tech gear and night-vision goggles, whose task is to make precision landings and maneuvers in order to rescue hostages or fleeing friendlies (respectively) out of the danger zone. When it works, it makes for some of the most popular ShackTac videos of all time.
• Catchphrase: "Welcome to ShackTac."
• Challenge Seeker:
  • Dslyecxi has made quite a few videos showcasing this sort of behavior he has towards the Littlebird helicopter. Some are solo videos where he is just performing all sorts of insane aerobatics, while others show off hot and tight-space landings in a variety of extremely dangerous situations.
    • Helicopter Hangar Challenge is a short video showing Dslyecxi attempting a challenge offered by some other ARMA Youtuber. The challenge is to fly the Littlebird into an aircraft hangar and land it, while the tail rotor is disabled, in first-person view. On his first attempt, he nails the hangar landing flawlessly, and then takes off and repeats this with each and every hangar on the runway.
    • In Spin Me Right Round, his tail rotor and main rotor are damaged early on in the mission, but for the sake of the challenge he refuses to get a new chopper - instead flying the entire mission with these damaged parts. And miraculously surviving it.
  • In S.H.A.C.K.E.R Pt.1, Beagle (who is playing a helpless female civilian character) tries to make his own life safer by getting Dslyecxi to be this. It fails.
    Beagle: Better keep an eye on me, Dslyecxi. I run slower than you.
    Dslyecxi: Ah.
    Beagle: I'm just saying, the Ultimate Survivalist would be able to get me off the island.
    Dslyecxi: [laughs] Well, knowing you run slower than me is kind of reassuring, in a last-ditch kind of way.
• Cold War: Once ArmA 3 came out, which is set 20 Minutes into the Future, Dslyecxi has expressed a preference for ArmA 2's late Cold War setting, which includes NATO and WARPACT equipment and vehicles from throughout the decades of that war. He has stated that the futuristic weaponry is simply too deadly, making it harder to create the same level of challenge that ShackTac missions attempt to create. This ties in with ShackTac's aversion to magnified optics on small arms, emphasis on guerilla tactics, and mostly-infantry-based warfare.
  • To this end, ShackTac now relies greatly on several Cold War mods that attempt to import this content from ArmA 2 into ArmA 3, such as the CUP and RHS mods.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Dslyecxi is the embodiment of this trope - and in a setting where he does not in fact have any external advantage. It often seems that the more enemies he has to contend with, the more dangerous he gets.
  • Although To The Last ends with Dslyecxi's death, it is an excellent example. Dslyecxi is the Platoon Medic, initially is surrounded by plenty of friendlies defending a small hill, and he is generally too busy treating their injuries to actually shoot anybody. As the video progresses, more and more friendlies are cut down, and the unit is gradually surrounded. By the half-way point of the video, most of the unit has been destroyed, leaving only Dslyecxi and Bricks to try to come up with an escape plan. It is at this point, when then enemy are closing in to dangerous range, that Dslyecxi's kill count begins to increase rapidly - and even more-so when Bricks finally bites the dust. Averted at the very end of the video, where the sheer number of enemies finally overwhelms him.
    [After Dslyecxi finally dies]
    Sixty: Dslyecxi, if I've ever seen a last stand... that was the last stand of last stands.
  • In Too Hot to FAC, Dslyecxi stands up to four enemy tanks, and wins. Later in the mission, however, a single tank finally gets him.
  • House Medic Shall Not Fall begins with BLUFOR (the enemy) making a multi-pronged assault on the Russian defenders, easily pushing them back towards their Alamo, and wiping out most of OPFOR Bravo in the process. With only three men left, Bravo retreats and manages to reach its designated "last stand" position: A lone farmhouse, exposed on the far flank of the defense. As masses of BLUFOR soldiers close in on Bravo's position, Dslyecxi gets killed trying to scout the enemy's advance, leaving only Kaiga12 (a rifleman) and Juice (a medic) to defend themselves in that little house. If the title hasn't tipped you off, Kaiga and Juice proceed to annihilate BLUFOR.
• Conveniently Timed Attack from Behind: In Scuba's First Beat, rookie Officer ScubaSteve's entire unit has just been wiped out in an ambush by Nautilus. Scuba is stuck in his car, with Nautilus shouting at him to drop his weapon. Nautilus then loses patience and start counting down to Scuba's death. Three, two, one... and then Hippeus, another (totally uninvolved) criminal, runs up and shoots him in the back.
  [Post-death chat]
  Hippeus: Sorry Nautilus, that was just too much of an opportunity.
  Nautilus: Why, Hippeus? Why?!
  Hippeus: 'Cause I fucking saw you holding a guy up, and I thought you must feel like such a badass right now, I have to stop that.
• Cosmic Plaything: If someone in the unit jinxes it by commenting on how well they've been doing so far, the entire unit may become this. The cosmic entity in question is the Game Master, usually ZX64, who will take such comments as blasphemy and double the efforts of hurting that specific unit.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: A lot of care is put into ensuring that the level of challenge is exactly right, especially in Adversarial (PvP) missions - but a single unfortunate error on the part of the designer and/or the players can still easily lead to a Curb Stomp Battle. Some examples include:
  • CHKilroy's Vybor Deploy Defense, where the defenders don't even use the dirty moves they discussed during the construction of their fortress, and still manage to wipe out the attackers with only 20% casualties (which is practically nothing in ArmA terms).
  • The ending of Getting Ugly shows what happens when the mission design doesn't work in exactly the way the designer intended. Enemy anti-aircraft along with several enemy attack helicopters and jets appear all of a sudden, destroying Dslyecxi's chopper before he even gets a chance to react.
  • In Defense of Bar Kanday, the defending team correctly estimates the attackers' approach vector, and Dslyecxi puts up a serious fight in his sector, mowing down a large group of them. The enemy then overruns all positions, and wins with a remarkably low casualty count, despite all of Dslyecxi's work.
  • Heavy machine gun vs. Littlebird in Flyswatter. It took only 4 bullets.
  • This happened during two of the early Headless AI Client tests, in The Best Worst Idea and Craftwork Paradrop. The Headless Client a dedicated server whose only job is to think for the AI - making them much smarter and incredibly dangerous. Each test ended with the entire platoon being wiped out within minutes.
• Danger Deadpan:
  • Getting Jive's voice to show emotion is practically impossible. His British accent is authoritative, calm, and precise at all times - even under heavy fire. Whether this is a result of him being a pilot in real life, or a factor that helped him get that job, has yet to be ascertained.
  • Solace is also this, as evidenced in older videos where he was always leading one element or another into heavy combat. Another British accent there.
  • Dslyecxi can be this at times (and decidedly not at other times).
    • One great example occurs during Too Hot to FAC. Dslyecxi is on foot, alone, in the middle of a crowd of T-72s and BMPs, as friendly helicopters try to destroy those vehicles without killing him with them. As the tanks get destroyed, their crews begin to dismount and attack Dslyecxi with their personal weapons, at incredibly close ranges. Under constant fire, he miraculously manages to kill about 6 of them, and then the following exchange takes place:
    August (apache pilot on radio): Can you mark your position again? There's possible infantry moving in on you.
    [Dslyecxi aims, shoots, and kills a 7th enemy]
    Dslyecxi: Yeah, I've been shooting them.
• Deal with the Devil: In Hip Hip Hooray Dslyecxi jokes that he had signed a deal with the devil allowing him to do things like shoot down a Hip with an anti-tank launcher, but the deal is it has to land on friendlies. The joke calls back to several instances over the previous few months where Dslyecxi had shot down helicopters that ended up landing on or near friendlies.
• Death Is Cheap: Despite the fact that dozens —if not hundreds— of Shackers will die in every mission, this trope is still averted. Players will often express sincere dismay when their friends die. On the other hand, when a death is explicitly comical, you can expect the appropriate Black Humor instead.
• Death Seeker: May happen to the last survivor of a team, especially in Cooperative missions.
  • Ghostboots, at the end of Optimistic Garmsar.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: At the start of U.N. Sleepover, CHKilroy and his U.N. peacekeeping team are injured by a mission script, which cripples them and prevents them from being healed for the remainder of the mission. They are eventually rescued by a medevac vehicle and taken to safety, but the medics can't do anything to un-cripple them. CHKilroy, by now fed-up with having to crawl everywhere, realizes that suffering a second, non-scripted injury might confuse the script and allow the medics to finally treat them all. How to get that second injury, though? Simple! Shoot each other in the foot!
  CHKilroy: They didn't clear me to engage hostiles, but they cleared me to engage friendlies!
• Descending Ceiling: Captain Morgan features a squad-sized Russian assault on a small enemy aircraft carrier^note Technically, a "Landing Helicopter Dock" as part of a larger operation. The unit enters through the bottom of the ship, ending up in front of a big elevator that goes up to the hangar deck. Due to a weird glitch, one of the first soldiers to go up the elevator falls off the platform and into the shaft, and is unable to get back out again. Of course, the mission has to continue, and there's no other way up to the hangar deck, so... the others call the elevator down again, crushing him.
• Destroy the Evidence: Officer Beagle does this in ShackCops Returns. When a car drives past and runs down a civilian he had been questioning (and probably preparing to execute, as he did to another civilian moments earlier), Beagle shoots out its tires with his shotgun, and then discovers that he may or may not have killed the driver. The entire thing is a mess to explain, so Beagle opts to blow the whole scene up with a satchel charge.
  Officer Beagle: Hey, BlackDragon?
  Officer BlackDragon: Yeah?
  Officer Beagle: You can be my witness for, like, an internal review, right?
  Officer BlackDragon: Yeah!
  Officer Beagle: Ok, well, you see that car over there? He came driving in, and I shot his tire out, but I didn't shoot him. And I'm not saying he's dead, but...
  [Massive satchel charge explosion in the distance]
  Officer Beagle: Oh my god! Well, there goes all the evidence, I guess.
• Deus ex Machina: On very rare occasions, it seems like the AI "backs off" for no real reason, instead of besieging a unit of Shackers indefinitely, or hounding an escaping element to death. This is likely actual intervention by the Game Master, ensuring that the situation doesn't become hopeless. Of course, the Game Master is just as likely to decide that a unit must die (or the mission may be scripted as Unwinnable by Design from the get-go), leading to Diabolus ex Machina instead. The fact that you never know which one it's going to be is a major part of the fun of watching ShackTac CoOp missions.
  • The BMPs that assaulted Dslyecxi's position in Jumpin' Into It drive off instead of destroying the building where a dozen Shackers are hiding. This is a blessing for the team hiding inside, since they had no other way of fighting off those BMPs.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The more common type of "outside interference" in CoOp missions. Expect this to happen at the very worst time, especially during a Hope Spot. Commonly used to end a mission when only a few players are still alive and it's getting time to start a new mission - at which point a Mi-24 Hind or BTR will probably show up to hunt down and annihilate them. May also result from jinxing your team ^note basically, angering the Game Master with your hubris. Finally, a mission may be Unwinnable by Design, thereby having a Diabolus pre-scripted to appear sooner or later.
  • The ending of Midnight Run qualifies. Hinds show up to blow up the players' boats just as they've gotten in and begun to leave for safety.
  • An unintentional one occurs at the very end of Getting Ugly. So many powerful enemy assets appear suddenly out of nowhere that Dslyecxi doesn't even have time to react before he's shot down. This was reportedly a design error.
  • Beautifully averted in Two Bullets Away, where the escape attempt is pretty much the whole point of the video.
  • In Stop Loss, as things start getting increasingly grim, the Platoon has received clearance to skip the last objective and go straight home. INDFOR gets airlifted out, and everybody is getting into their vehicles to punch it out of there when suddenly enemy grenades rip half the convoy to shreds, killing more than a dozen players within seconds.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Perfectly Criminal, as its name suggests, shows one of Dslyecxi's most successful rounds of The Game. He kills one target after the other in increasingly impressive ways, at one point even managing to kill a player (Cypher) who was backed up by the entire police force, and convincing the cops to back him now. They all converge on his very last target, CraneSong — a pFNG — who promptly beats him at his own game.
• Disguised Hostage Gambit: In Sit With Me, Dslyecxi slowly exchanges his clothes with the hostages that he is protecting against an enemy rescue raid. He then orders the hostages to stand in a window, to try and get the enemy to shoot at them.
• Distracted from Death: In Can't Touch This, Dsylecxi needs to make two trips to evacuate the handful of survivors from an entire platoon that has been whittled down during a huge firefight. On the first trip, one of the guys takes a hit or two and dies, and nobody notices until they get to safety and are jumping out of the helicopter, at which point they notice how the dead guy is slumped over and not getting off the helicopter.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": ShackTac players may operate like a well-oiled machine, but they are just players coming to have fun. As such, it is highly unusual (and possibly even discouraged) to hear someone calling their leader "Sir" under any circumstances - unless it's a deliberate joke.
  • This (slightly abridged) conversation from Closing Out:
    Bravo SL: We're going to be assisting Delta on the Forbidden Village.
    SharksForArms: Yes, sir.
    Bravo SL: Ok, we're going to go One left, Two right. Gonna push directly towards "Bravo Clear".
    SharksForArms: Two copies, sir.
    Bravo SL: Please don't call me "Sir". Two, take it direct west, please.
    SharksForArms: Yes, ma'am.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Very rare (and actually impossible before ArmA 3), but always awesome when performed. It is actually discouraged under normal circumstances, for a variety of reasons (not least being that this will likely get you killed by your own team). There are, however, several cases where it was justified and put to good use.
  • Dslyecxi does this at the end of Redcon, with an enemy vehicle of all things. Once BLUFOR (the enemy) leave the combat area with their convoy, Dslyecxi takes one of the PMC vehicles they had left behind. With SlappyMoose in the back seat, they head off in pursuit of the enemy. BLUFOR, believing them to be their PMC stragglers, actually let them go right past a checkpoint, whereupon the two insurgents reach the BLUFOR staging area and carry out a deadly Suicide Attack.
  • Taconic tries a variant of this in desperation at one point in Push Comes to Shove. Taconic is fleeing at night from a large squad, trying to avoid being taken captive. Towards the end he tries to hide out in a swamp, and the team hunting him have their flashlights on as they look for him. Realizing he's probably about to be spotted, Taconic turns on his own flashlight, comes out of his hiding spot, and walks around normally, pretending to be a member of the search squad. It works, but unfortunately all it does is buy Taconic a little time.
• Drives Like Crazy:
  • At the end of Company of pFNGs, Beagle arrives in an Mi-8 helicopter to evacuate what remains of Dslyecxi's platoon. As they egress, an enemy anti-aircraft gun opens up on the helo, threatening to shoot it down. Dslyecxi orders Beagle to dive, which Beagle does - and then fails to pull out and crashes the helicopter into a hillside. Strangely, most of the men survive.
  • In Absolute Madness Silence takes over as driver of the Jackal carrying the survivors from Alpha. He is ordered to go south along the road, but mishears the order, misses the road, and drives the vehicle straight into the jungle. In his attempt to drive back out of it he keeps grazing trees left and right, injuring his passengers and himself repeatedly, and finally drives the vehicle right into an ambush.
    Dslyecxi: Worst Uber ever!
• Epic Hail: Delta squad in Dslyecxi's Operation OnStar make their way towards Alpha and a pair of Bradleys, when they suddenly observe a vehicle exploding on the ridgeline ahead, in Alpha's general direction. The members of Delta then wonder aloud whether that might be Alpha calling for aid.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Due to quirks in the ArmA game engine, vehicles may explode even if hit with weapons that shouldn't cause them to explode, or even due to simple collision damage. This is more apparent in ArmA 2 videos, especially when driving cars into small rocks. The variety of ways this has come into play in ShackTac videos ranges from face-palming accidents to full-blown moments of awesome.
  • In Taconic's Push Comes to Shove, while he is desperately attempting to evade a whole platoon of enemies on his tail, an enemy truck suddenly stumbles upon Taconic and begins to pursue. He turns around and empties a magazine into the side of the truck, which explodes spectacularly behind him. ^note The truck was a Russian KAMAZ with exposed fuel tanks on its side, which is what Taconic was generally shooting at. The explosion was probably a result of a lucky hit to the fuel tank - although ArmA is not known for having that precise of a damage model.
    YouTube comment: That truck must have thought it was in an 80's movie.
  • Aircraft in ArmA are particularly prone to this, as painfully demonstrated in Dslyecxi's Now Boarding!. The second plane trying to take off from the runway appears to graze a large pile of hay with the very tip of its wing, and is instantly destroyed along with all passengers.
• Exclusive Enemy Equipment: Since the fighting forces are rarely equipped the same way, searching enemy bodies can yield some very special equipment not previously available to your side. However, this usually applies only to support equipment, not weapons. Picking up enemy weapons, as cool as they might be, is a good way to get yourself killed by friendly fire.
  • In Oh Taliban, Dslyecxi manages to acquire a pair of thermal binoculars from the corpses of an enemy observation team he had slaughtered, which later allows his fireteam to flank and destroy yet another enemy group.
  • In An Interesting Round of Dark Business, CHKilroy is desperately trying to make contact with BLUFOR in the hopes that they can rescue him from being executed by OPFOR. When he hears an M-249 SAW firing in the distance, he naturally drives straight towards it — only to run into Dslyecxi, an OPFOR operative, who had killed several BLUFOR men and taken their weapons and night-vision gear. Whoopsie!
• Failed a Spot Check: Shackers are only human, and can often develop a sort of tunnel vision that makes them miss seemingly obvious things. Some more notable examples include:
  • In The Con, Taconic gets distracted while talking on his radio, and fails to see an entire enemy fire team dead ahead of him and only a few meters away. For several seconds after they're visible he continues talking on his radio until he finally sees them and tries to throw himself to the ground and get to cover. By then, however, it's too late.
  • Most of the videos where Dsylecxi wipes out or does significant damage to a fire team or squad, although often a bad formation or inexperience is equally to blame when it's a group of pFNGs, as in And That's Why You Have 360 and Ninja pFNG Attack. In videos like Dslyecxi on the Hunt, Making Lemonade, and Look Around You Dslyecxi successfully either stalks or flanks his enemies while being incredibly close to them, in situations where it seems like any turn of the head or simply not looking ahead to the point of ignoring everything else would give him away. In the last of those videos, Dslyecxi even runs in formation with his enemies and they don't notice!
  • The Two Towers has a pretty forgivable case. For just a couple of seconds around 4:35 into the vid, an enemy squad can be seen running among the trees on a distant hillside, looking to flank Dslyecxi's squad. Dslyecxi and company have their focus on the movement of a different enemy squad, however. Just about two minutes after failing to see the group flanking them, the enemy start their attack in earnest from both sides, and Dslyecxi and his squad are annihilated in short order.
  • The first thing that happens after Dslyecxi ends his introductory narration for Against All Odds is a BLUFOR player literally running straight into a prone Apollo, (an OPFOR player) and not noticing due to the darkness and terrain. Later in the video a different BLUFOR player runs around the area where Beagle and Apollo have taken cover several times, passing within a few meters, without ever noticing, and later still Beagle manages to shadow a BLUFOR squad and during one sequence is almost close enough to touch the guys he's following, and they don't see him. Beagle hesitates a little too long to spring an ambush on them however, and when he tries to shadow them once more he finally gets spotted and is almost immediately killed. There's still one more moment in the video, however, as Apollo basically runs right up to a BLUFOR agent, who apparently either doesn't see him or doesn't register that Apollo isn't on his side due to the darkness. After a few seconds, Apollo ventilates the BLUFOR guy appropriately.
  • Late in Bushwackin' Dslyecxi is only half concealed at the very most by a bush he has taken cover in, yet at least two different fireteams of enemies manage to miss him as he calmly stays there and picks them off one or two at a time while they try to take a couple of buildings that the rest of his team are sheltering in. One guy passes within, at most, two meters away and Dslyecxi is mostly exposed, but he still goes unnoticed.
  • This is the sole point of Dslyecxi's video Wanna see a Magic Act?. Dslyecxi and the rest of the squad are running along a completely open road, when all of a sudden they are confronted by an enemy squad that appears fifty meters ahead on the road, seemingly out of nowhere. Just another ArmA glitch? No, upon closer examination it turns out that the color of the background and the color of the enemy uniforms, as well as the contour and shape of the road itself, helped conceal an entire enemy unit running in plain view in the opposite direction.
  • War is Kinda Funny has a pFNG who not only manages to completely miss an enemy standing only feet off to the side from him, he also studiously ignores Dylyecxi's attempts to warn him about the danger he's in. This ends predictably.
    Dslyecxi: [As he sees the pFNG about to run right past where an enemy Russian has taken position] Bad guy! Bad guy! [pFNG ignores this, runs right past the Russian without looking around and into the street where he's directly in the Russian's line of fire] Don't stand there! Don't stand the- [Russian finally fires, instantly killing the pFNG]
• Fake Action Prologue: Osprey Ferryman begins with a shot of an Osprey attempting to land in the middle of a hot LZ, taking fire from all sides. The video itself, while it is about Ospreys, does not have anything even remotely as exciting. Note however that Dslyecxi did put a very clear warning on the screen, to ensure that everyone understands this before they watch the rest of the video.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out:
  • Used in Nomads. Dslyecxi ends the video about 2/3 of the way in, after the second objective has been captured. However, instead of the video actually ending, it takes a sudden swerve into horror territory.
  • Similarly, in From Russia With Love, Dslyecxi and his team have spent a whole mission watching a captured American pilot. After all of the pilot's would be rescuers have been killed, they tell the pilot he's free to go and Dslyecxi's usual end of video graphics play... and then the video returns to the action as Dslyecxi and the other Russians chase the pilot down, march him up to a cliff, form a firing squad, then shoot the pilot and let his body fall into the sea. Damn.
• Fakin' MacGuffin:
  • Attempted by Beagle's IND force in one round of Dark Business. Instead of handing off the two hostages, Beagle swaps one of them for Taconic - a member of his own team. CHKilroy's perspective of this mission is appropriately named The Ol' Texas Swap.
• Fearless Fool: Not only has Kevb0 never met a charge that he didn't like, he generally seems to completely disdain the usual precautions one should take in a military simulator, especially a fairly realistic one like ARMA. It's common to see Kevb0 declining to use cover and instead standing right out in the open for instance, where an enemy could easily see and kill him, and he has in fact been caught and killed doing that in multiple cases. (About half of the Youtube comments from Dodging This aren't about Dslyecxi's incredible feat of dodging machine gun fire, it's about the fact that he managed to keep Kevb0 from getting killed by that same machine gun while standing out in the open.) Close quarters combat isn't really any better; Clearing With Kevb0, for example, shows Kevb0 taking risks like staying dangerously close to areas where he just threw a grenade, hanging out near open doorways while enemies shoot at him from inside the room, or stepping into a room where he knows Dslyecxi is clearing out enemies without giving Dslyecxi any warning that he's stepping into the line of fire. The last one brings him incredibly close to eating a bullet. You can't deny Kevb0's courage, but you can say a lot about the wisdom of his tactics.
• Field Promotion: When commanders die during a mission, others need to assume their position in order to maintain a working chain of command. Usually, whenever a leader of any element dies, the next most senior commander in that element will take over. Most people standing in line to "inherit" command are ready for that eventuality and can take over without issue, though command occasionally falls down to people who do not have the necessary experience. Another complication may be to locate the body of the fallen commander and retrieve the "148" radio (or "152" in ArmA 3), which may or may not be impossible at the time.
• First-Person Perspective: The vast majority of ShackTac videos are this, since the group mostly plays ArmA and occasionally other First Person Shooters. We can hear everything that the player we're watching says, too, so he will occasionally "speak to himself" even when no one else in-game is there to hear it, as a way of conveying his thoughts directly to us (the people who'll watch the footage).
  • Dslyecxi's Stay Awhile and Listen is a video of a mission where Dslyecxi was alone and almost totally silent for 25 minutes. Instead of having us watch in silence, he added post-game narration to explain what he is doing at every point, and what is going through his head.
• For the Evulz/It Amused Me: Dslyecxi has been known to do this from time to time.
  • At least in the past, he would sometimes pop into missions where the Shackers were facing off against the AI and... "test" them, particularly with pFNG sessions. Very often Dslyecxi would wreak havoc on the other players who were taking it easy or thought that they weren't in any particular danger due to only fighting AI and/or thinking there were no enemies in the area.
  • Everyone remembers Dsylecxi's infamous interrogation of John, but what's not always remembered is that John was the last player up on his team, and the match ended the moment Dslyecxi finally stopped toying with John and killed him. So everything before that was at best Dslyecxi being a Trickster Mentor to John and making sure he'd remember this lesson, at worst it was just having a bit of sadistic fun with the newcomer, because the information Dslyecxi gained served no purpose whatsoever. Even Dslyecxi acknowledged that the situation was kind of messed up in a typed comment after it was all over.
    Dslyecxi: oh my god i am going to hell.
  • In a clip from a video that was never made public but did show up in Dslyecxi's 2016 Year in Review, during a game session problems with the game scripts required Dslyecxi to exit the game and to manually run the mission as a Game Master so that everyone else could continue playing. He ends his role as an active player in the mission by getting a tearful and distraught Ghostboots to put him down, Old Yeller style. This devastates Ghostboots, and as Dslyecxi says in a youtube comment describing the whole incident:
    Dslyecxi: I mean, I didn't have to have him kill me. I could've just respawned. Wouldn't have been as traumatic for him, though, y'know?
• Frontline General: Kevb0's command style is to put himself with the team in the greatest amount of danger, and then stand up in the open to observe enemy movements with his binoculars. When it's time to charge, Kevb0 will be at the very point of the element, breaching buildings and suing for contact - sometimes even if he is Platoon Command. If Kevb0 makes it alive to the end of the mission, the other players will usually express their surprise.
  Everyone, at one point or another: Kevb0's dead.
• Genre Savvy: Meta-gaming is heavily discouraged, if not punished. This mostly applies to exploiting Good Bad Bugs, or any other exploitation of ArmA's quirks. Nonetheless, it is quite alright to utilize your knowledge about the other players. This is why anyone who becomes extremely wary when told to guard Dslyecxi is being Genre Savvy (although that won't save them when Dslyecxi makes his move).
  • From Know Your Surroundings:
    Dslyecxi: You guys need to relax. There's one of me, and there's, like, many of you.
    IND Guard: Yeah, there's one of you, but it only takes one of you to kill everyone.
  • Being Genre Savvy is almost a requirement in order to win The Game.
• Good Bad Bugs: In Universe. In ShackTac, a bug isn't usually seen as "Good" if it has beneficial results (in fact players are discouraged from exploiting bugs to their advantage); But it is definitely good if the results are entertaining. The more people die in a bizarre and amusing way, the better. And ArmA has a very wide variety of lethal bugs.
  • Wonky explosion damage:
    • Hello Blast Damage, My Old Friend
  • Wonky vehicle physics:
    • Tanking It to the Next Level
    • Never Go Full Retard
    • Very Successfully Preparing a Position
    • Technically a Flip
    • Sky Miles
  • Wonky building physics:
    • Strongpoint Giggles
  • Respawning explosives:
    • A Front Row Seat to the Massacre
  • Invincible enemies:
    • Boss Battle
  • Schrodinger's helicopter engine:
    • Everything is Fine
  • Phase-shifting stairs:
    • Oil Rigged
  • Animals opening doors:
    • Lil' Buddy
    • Bunny
  • Deadly resupply crates:
    • Crate Times were Had
  • And many, many more...
• Going to See the Elephant: At some point during The Silver Briefcase, the two Independents escorting Dslyecxi realize that the briefcase is probably a Red Herring, but they decide to keep looking for it because the journey would be fun in its own right. The "journey" ends up killing both of them.
• Bad Cop: SHACKCOPS
• Good Luck Charm: In early 2016, Ghostboots claimed he was this to Dslyecxi, or possibly the other way around. He claimed that whenever the two men are together in the same unit, and Dslyecxi is the leader of that unit, then Ghostboots cannot die unless Dslyecxi dies first. This streak of luck seemed to last for nearly half a year's worth of videos after that initial proclamation - and appeared capable of deflecting even direct jinxes on the unit (which, in ShackTac, are considered very Serious Business).
• The Grotesque: Much has been said about kevb0's horrifying in-game face, although it truly hides the hero Shack Tactical deserves.
• Hellish Copter: Since ArmA has fairly good modeling of helicopters and their flight characteristics, this does not often occur in a contrived fashion as it does in Hollywood movies. Nonetheless, the extremely dangerous combat environment, coupled with the fact that most Shacker pilots are at best skilled amateurs, helicopters do get shot down all the time, whether they are player- or AI-controlled.
  • The occasional glitch makes it all so much worse, as seen in Who's the Boss?
  • The primary exception is, of course, Dslyecxi - a master helicopter pilot. In the very few instances where he actually gets shot down, it usually means that the situation was really that bad.
  • Dslyecxi and Ghostboots are on the receiving end of this in That's NOT What I Meant. Near the end of the video, Dslyecxi suggests a landing zone for the extraction helicopters in a small courtyard between some buildings. The first chopper comes in, and its rotor just barely clips a building, causing the helicopter to explode and kill almost everyone in the vicinity - nearly a full squad.
    Ghostboots: NOOOOOO—!!! *Boom*
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In Hip Shooting Dslyecxi shoots down three different Russian helicopters, (which are called "Hips" by NATO countries) and each time it winds up coming back to bite him. The first time he shoots at the helicopter and apparently kills the pilot... only for the helicopter to crash very close to him and nearly kill him. With the second helicopter Dslyecxi gets injured by the backblast from his own RPG. (And possibly a shot from the Hip's door gunner.) The last time, Dslyecxi fires on the Hip, and appears to wound or kill the pilot again, but as the copter is coming down the door gunner focuses fire solely on Dslyecxi, inflicting multiple lethal wounds. After Dslyecxi finally dies from the wounds he sustained, the other Shackers voice surprise at both how many times he was hit, and what an enormous blood smear was left behind as a result.
  Dslyecxi: [as he sees the first helicopter about to crash right next to him after shooting it] Oh boy, I regret that. [helicopter crashes, Dslyecxi is knocked unconscious]
• Hope Spot:
  • Tends to happen at the end of the mission, if the survivors believe that they can finish their mission / escape the area despite everything else. Expect a Diabolus ex Machina to show up and annihilate them, instead.
  • There's one at the end of Friendlies in Cherno?. After hours of fighting and with both platoons whittled down to very few survivors, several attempts are made to destroy the objective - a radar tower. On the first attempt, satchel charges are placed around the tower, but the Shackers carrying the detonators get killed. One of the other guys makes it up to the tower and tries to scrounge up more charges from the dead bodies, but he gets killed too. Finally, Taconic and Dallas — the only two remaining survivors out of the hundred people that went into the mission — find a disabled enemy SPG Technical parked on a hillside in perfect view of the tower... but the SPG refuses to shoot, and as they take cover behind the vehicle from a hail of incoming enemy fire, the vehicle finally explodes and kills them both.
  • In Make Them Pay, Sephith and CraneSong are the two remaining players in Charlie squad, surrounded inside a large building within an enemy-infested compound, with at least one enemy T-55 tank patrolling outside. They resolve to make their escape, and do manage to get out of the building while covering each other and shooting enemies left and right. They find a gap in the wall only a few meters from the corner of the building, and decide to make a run for it. As soon as they run out of that corner, the T-55 fires a shell at them through a window of the same building, instantly killing them both.
  • In CraneSong's Hot Mike after a group consisting of Crane, Cappy, Ghostboots and Dslyecxi are trapped in a building surrounded by enemy troops and armor, they come up with a desperate plan to make a run for it. They start to exit the building... and Dslyecxi is immediately killed by a rocket to the face, leaving Cappy and Ghostboots in a panic, but Crane tries to escape along the planned route and briefly seems ready to miraculously break past the troops and maybe make it clear. Unfortunately she's spotted, and has to deal with navigating around a tank and an enemy soldier trading fire with her. It slows her down enough for her pursuers to catch up to her and kill her.
• Horrifying the Horror: Dslyecxi is usually the one responsible for terrifying the s*** out of unsuspecting players, but in a few of the zombie missions (DayZ and S.H.A.C.K.E.R), even Dslyecxi gets audibly stressed.
• Hostage for MacGuffin: The premise of the Dark Business mission, which makes for many of the most beloved videos over the years. In this scenario, INDFOR (the Independents) are in possession of two men they had captured, which OPFOR (the Russians) would very much like to get their hands on. OPFOR agrees to trade an ammo truck for the two hostages, so the team leaders set up a meeting to do a trade-swap. Of course, each side is very much interested in keeping both the ammo truck and the hostages (constituting a "major victory" for them), which means that the swap rarely goes smoothly. ^note Additionally, this mission is called Dark Business because the swap takes place under cover of darkness. Oh, and there is also a tiny but very-well-equipped group of BLUFOR (American) airborne special forces in the area, which is going to attempt to rescue the hostages unharmed...
• Hostage Situation: One occurs during A Hostage Situation, because of course it does. Negotiations don't go very well, and eventually it comes down to the pilot of the rescue helicopter having to land his aircraft and kill the last barricaded hostile himself.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: In the short video Oh No, An Ambush!, Dslyecxi realizes that a group of four players are stalking him. After dodging their initial attempt to kill him, (during which they briefly lose track of him) he turns the tables, flanks them, and cuts them down. By the end of the video Dslyecxi is seriously wounded but all four of his attackers are dead and probably wondering how it was possible for things to go so wrong.
• Hurricane of Puns: ShackTac members like to indulge in the occasional pun, and Dslyecxi has hinted that having a sense for puns is a factor in determining veterancy and rank within the group. Once in a while, when the situation is ripe for it, several players will burst into a Hurricane that can last at least several minutes. Expect the YouTube comments to continue the hurricane for several days afterwards.
• I'm Not a Hero, I'm...: Dslyecxi uses this in Two Bullets Away. As he and Mally are escaping on foot from a large pursuing force, Dslyecxi turns around, drops, and starts firing at the enemy, telling Mally to keep moving.
  Mally: I'm not leaving you, not after all this!
  Dslyecxi: Look, I'm not being heroic, just practical. You gotta go.
• Impending Doom P.O.V.: Any video from Dslyecxi's perspective in an adversarial game is this; a point-of-view shot through the eyes of the person who is likely going to stalk and kill quite a few people.
  • Look Around You. Dslyecxi spots a fireteam of enemy paratroopers dropping from a biplane into a little forest, and decides to go in there and kill them. In the thick foliage, he nails one in the head, and then shadows the rest of the enemy unit for several minutes, at one point running in formation with them across an open field. This goes on until one of them finally spots him, at which point it's already too late. In total, he kills five of them all by himself.
  • Silent Night is another good example of Dslyecxi stalking and killing enemies one by one, like some sort of hunting spider. Most of victims are shot in the head, at very close range, without them ever knowing Dslyecxi was there. This video showcases copious use of shadows to make silent observation, as well as highly deliberate maneuvers around the enemy, punctuated by sudden and deadly precision strikes. When coupled with the already creepy atmosphere of frozen Namalsk, in the dead of a moonlit night, you have a Mook Horror Show.
  • The trope is even more in effect if the video is actually the point-of-view of the spectators (people who had died earlier in the mission) looking through Dslyecxi's eyes at the events in real-time, as they unfold. The spectators will usually be heard talking to one another, commenting on what's going on and what they think will happen next.
    • One good example of this is Dslyecxi on the Hunt, where several ShackTac members watch Dslyecxi as he closely shadows an entire enemy platoon for more than a dozen minutes, and ends up killing quite a few of them. For bonus points, the other players have no idea that Dslyecxi is even supposed to be there - they believe they're only fighting the AI. He manages to get extremely close several times without getting detected.
    • Another is Beagle's video And That's Why You Have 360, where Dslyecxi sneaks up on, surprises, and annihilates a group of 4 other players in the space of about one minute — with the entire spectator channel watching in sympathy.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: In Breaking Baddies, Dslyecxi spots an enemy soldier several hundred meters out from his position - at the very edge of effective weapon range. Figuring he "might as well", Dslyecxi fires a single literal "long shot" at that enemy, who drops to the ground in response. Dslyecxi takes out his binoculars to check out how his target is reacting to being fired on - only to discover that he had just sniped the soldier dead.
  Dslyecxi: Holy shit!
• Infectious Enthusiasm:
  • When Dslyecxi is excited about something, other players tend to go along, and are usually guaranteed an intense experience as their reward (though it could still get them gruesomely killed).
    • This is how SlappyMoose got to participate in Dslyecxi's Suicide Attack on the enemy rally point at the end of Redcon.
    • The reverse happens in Two Bullets Away. After an assault on Zargabad goes terribly wrong, Dslyecxi finds himself alone and cornered in a building inside the city, and resolves to make a heroic last stand against the dozens of enemies surrounding his location. That's when the platoon's only other survivor, Mally, gets in contact with him and finally convinces a reluctant Dslyecxi to try to escape the area together. Together the two not only escape the city, but spend the next half hour or so outrunning and outfighting their pursuers until their allies can finally rescue them in what became one of the best videos of 2015.
    • The Silver Briefcase is a story about how Dslyecxi managed to infect his enemies with enthusiasm. He leads them on a wild goose chase, screwing up their plans and getting them all killed in the process. They seem to have enjoyed every minute of it.
    OrangeSoda: It's more fun just playing along.
  • Kevb0 tries to do this by leading from the front. However many of the Shackers are well aware that whatever he is enthusiastically leading them into will likely get Kevb0 killed first, and may get everyone else killed too. Newer players may not yet be aware that this is an eventuality, and so they get swept up into it willingly.
• Internal Retcon: Shackers will sometimes do this to cover up for their numerous war crimes.
  • Dslyecxi makes A Case for Body Cams, when he films MGbait breaching a church, and quickly blowing away two unarmed criminals hiding inside with shotgun blasts at close range.
    MGbait: I was going to say the shotgun sucks ass, but goddamn, it is sexy awesome when you get close. Oh, sorry... STOP RESISTING ARREST!
    [Fires another blast into one of the corpses at point-blank range]
    MGbait: Alright, we're good here.
• Intrepid Reporter: Kilroy and Beagle in AAN Evening Report are reporters covering a battle between American troops and local insurgents. Partway through the fight, they decide to try and get an interview with the insurgent commander, in an attempt to become famous (posthumously or otherwise).
• It Works Better with Bullets: More often resulting from people disarming their own weapons by mistake, or picking up weapons they think are loaded, but aren't. In the context of ArmA, such an innocent mistake could have very bad consequences.
  • In Tap Tap in Drip Drip, Dslyecxi's isolated fireteam fends off against an infantry assault backed up by BMDs, and expends its anti-tank rocket supply. After the fight, they scrounge up two RPG launchers from the bodies of the enemy infantry they had just killed, and move up to rejoin the rest of the squad. When another pair of BMDs suddenly shows up, they discover that they hadn't bothered checking whether the RPGs they picked up actually had rockets in them.
  • Taconic has one such moment in Welcome Back to Tanoa. When he takes a grenade launcher from Sixty's dead body, he uses an ArmA shortcut that unfortunately also drops all of his rifle ammo. A few minutes later, he suddenly discovers exactly how much he needs those bullets, when his unit is surrounded and slaughtered by a dozen North Vietnamese soldiers. Not that it would've really helped.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: Accidental trigger pulls are very rare in ShackTac, because Shack'ers practice virtual gun safety by keeping their trigger finger off their left mouse button - a very important precaution. However the few cases where guns go off accidentally are almost all lethal. This is because the accidental click will usually occur when one player is attempting to interact with another player's ruck, or when giving them first-aid - meaning that the bullet will likely be fired right into that person from point blank range.
• Just Eat Gilligan: What Dslyecxi thinks they should do with EvilScotsman, instead of having to put up with him. It's all for laughs, of course.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Happens quite often. It's a fairly reliable way to tell when someone has just died. Will usually be followed by someone else calling worriedly on the radio to ask if the speaker is still alive.
  • A very precise example of this trope, near the end of ShackTac Chakchak Attack:
    "Mike two, this is Charlie. I'm the last remaining one in my sq— [rat-tat-tat]"
  • An out-of-universe moment of this happens in The Pizza Incident. Before mission-start, Connorwarman calls his local Domino's to ask them why his pizza hasn't arrived - and puts the Domino's employee on speaker-phone so that everyone can hear. Just as the call goes through, the squad runs into enemies.
    Connorwarman: You know what's even more hilarious? It's that when those rounds started coming in, I just started screaming "Oh shit!", and then abruptly hung up on the guy. So I wonder what he thinks happened. He probably thinks I got robbed, or something.
  • CHKilroy's description of I'm Sorry, Okay? Please Stop (a video where after Kilroy hits a tank with a rocket the AI spends the next thirty seconds trying to gun him down with the tank's machine guns until it finally gets Kilroy) mimics this happening, although it doesn't happen in the video itself.
    Kilroy's Video Description: Listen, let's just forget it ever happened, okay? Please? This isn't funny anymore. Please stop. Plea—
• Killed Off for Real: In the vast majority of ArmA missions, death is permanent - there is no respawning of any kind. Occasionally, if several players had been killed early in the mission, or had died due to some sort of unfair situation or a bug in the game, they will be allowed to "JIP" (or "Join In Progress") as a new reinforcement unit. The permanence of death promotes more responsible gameplay, and makes for very tense situations.
• Killer Cop: Beagle, whenever he is a cop in The Game, has a 99.9% probability of murdering someone in cold blood. He'll come up with excuses, but really he simply believes that everyone is guilty, and all deserve to be punished. His preferred method of execution is by incendiary gas can ^note especially, burning victims to death inside their own vehicles.
  • In Officer Beagle, he is confronted with a crime scene where three civilians have crashed their cars near an intersection. He guns one of them down (a rare justified killing), and then proposes to determine whether the remaining two are also guilty by putting a gas can between them and lighting it on fire, reasoning that if either of them survives, they must be innocent. When the two civilians object, he arrests them, puts them in his car, and drives the car right into a river - whereupon the car explodes, killing one of them.
    Officer Beagle: I think we can call that a conclusive trial.
  • In SHACKCOPS 2, he orders Forgotten to put his gun down and get out of his car. When Forgotten is unable to do either of these things due to a weird random glitch in ArmA, Beagle decides to "motivate" him to exit the car by placing a gas can under the car and setting it on fire.
    Forgotten (while burning alive): You bastard! I knew this was going to happen!
    Beagle: Nothing's happening. Just calm down, sir.
  • Taken to a new level in Kilroy's To Protect and Serve, where Kilroy and an entire squad of cops are actively hunting down and killing civilians with little to no reason. The end of the video includes repeatedly tormenting one civilian by setting off flashbangs and tear gas grenades in his face, then they have that guy face off with another civilian and tell the two men to draw on the count of three. When they do, both men are gunned down by the cops before they can even fire. The cops then laugh, shoot the bodies a few extra times to make sure they're dead, then go off to find more civilians.
• Killer Game Master:
  • Awo. Though he does not serve as Game Master very often, you'll know when he does: the mission will contain so many enemies as to be utterly unwinnable.
    • Demonstrated in under 2 minutes in An Easy Awo Mission. The server crashes on loading the mission because there are just too many enemies on the map for it to handle.
    • Conventional Suffering is a good example, even though the guys managed to get surprisingly far before being annihilated by a multitude of enemy armor.
    • Dslyecxi lampshades this in Quiet Woodland Walk:
    Dslyecxi: Awoihjaweohr [...] is a cool dude and mission-maker with ShackTac. For those of you who are wondering how to spell such an odd little nick, it's pretty simple. It's actually two words: The first word is spelled S-A-D-I-S-T-I-C, and the second word is B-A-S-T-A-R-D.
  • Dslyecxi in The Best Worst Idea, testing the then-new ArmA 2 Headless Client AI. On the other hand, he had to go through it with everybody else.
• Kinda Busy Here: In Pyrrhus, BSL, ChrisJSY is the only survivor of Alpha Squad, who is stuck at the far end of an enemy-occupied town. He maintains radio contact with Dslyecxi and Bravo Squad, while Dslyecxi cooks up a complicated multi-pronged assault to take that town. As Dslyecxi orders his men to begin the assault, this radio conversation takes place:
  ChrisJSY: Bravo?
  Dslyecxi: Go for Bravo.
  ChrisJSY: Enemy infantry, on Alpha 1's position. Multiple. Building.
  Dslyecxi: Copy. Can you keep them nice and distracted?
  [pause]
  ChrisJSY: I'm... hiding in a bush.
• Know When to Fold Them: In Taconic's No Good Deed..., Taconic and a small fire team with three other members are attempting to rescue a squad of allies who've run into a group of enemy tanks. The odds of the rescue succeeding look bad right from the start; nearly everyone in the squad was badly hurt or worse, they reported multiple tanks around them, which means that Dslyecxi can't fly his littlebird in for fear of getting shot down, so Taconic and crew are looking at trying to go in on foot and then drag or carry the wounded to a safe spot where they can be loaded onto the helicopter. Then Taconic's group encounters and exchanges fire with a tank, which kills two of the four members of the rescue team, but Taconic manages to score a direct hit on the tank. However, as soon as he lowers his anti-tank weapon, Taconic sees a second tank not far from the first. At that point Taconic assesses the odds and wisely calls off the rescue attempt. ^note In a comment on the video, Mr. H, who was probably the last one left from the squad that was being rescued, says that he thinks he was killed right around when Taconic first engaged the tank, so not only would any further attempts have gotten Taconic and company killed, there wasn't even anyone to save at that point.
  Taconic: [After staring at the second tank for several seconds] This is a lost cause. I hit one, there's still more coming. ... everyone fall back. Fall back.
• Lame Pun Reaction: Many members of Shack Tac over the years have seemed to enjoy puns and word play, (including Dslyexci himself, who is quite a fan) but sometimes someone's attempt at a pun will get universally panned. For example, when missions wrap up, there's usually some kind of comment by the game master about how things went. In Beach Slapped, where the Shack Tac crew was utterly wiped out by China's People's Liberation Army (or PLA) the closing comment is "They weren't PLAying around." This drew a variety of groans, derogatory comments, and literal boos from everyone in the chat.
• Language Barrier: Until August 2016, ShackTac used in-games voice communication which allowed soldiers of different factions (and nationalities) to converse with one another and overhear one another freely (within the constraints of the adjustable in-game voice range). Listening to enemies discussing their plans on the other side of a barrier, for example, or taunting the enemy, or confusing enemies by speaking to them — these were all legitimate tactics that were often seen employed to good or amusing effect.
  Dslyecxi's video Language Barrier changed all that, and ShackTac is now using the "Babel" function of the ACRE mod to scramble verbal communications between members of different factions. People whose characters shouldn't be able to speak each other's language now hear a weird distorted voice when the other person speaks. All words are incredibly difficult to understand, and even inflection seems to be all but gone from their voices. ArmA 3's hand gesturing system is still quite limited, making attempts to circumvent the language barrier difficult as well - as seen in this video.
  • In Language Barrier itself, a team of lightly-armed INDependents attempts to make contact with an American infantry platoon. They need to warn BLUFOR that an ICBM launcher is located two kilometers West of their position, with the hope of getting a helicopter ride out of the area in return for this information. The only problem is, no one can speak with the Americans. A lot of Translation by Volume ensues, and it is just as effective as you might think.
    • When combat died down a little, Dslyecxi made a rather effective attempt at working around the Language Barrier. He lined up his men in the direction of the ICBM and had them all salute, while he flashed his flashlight and fired several shots out in that direction. Word of God says that the message was at least partly understood by BLUFOR Acting PLT Zeta, but at that point his platoon could do nothing about it anyway, and shortly afterwards the entire force was indeed wiped out by Diabolus ex Machina.
    • At one point, after much frustration had already been accumulated, LoneWolf suggests that they could try doing what dogs do when they want you to follow them: Run a short distance away in the direction you want to go, stop, and look back at the human. And indeed, the Babel's voice distortion effect makes communications more similar to the Language Barrier that exists between humans and dogs, rather than between human beings.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • BMD Rally, part 1. Derp, manning a BMP turret on Charlie Vehicle 1, mistakes the company's ammo truck for an enemy vehicle, and destroys it:
    Dslyecxi (PLT): Why is it not surprising that it was Charlie Vehicle 1? Tell them they are on ceasefire from here on out. Actually, check that. Get the gunner out. Find someone else to replace him. Furthermore, Charlie Victor 1 gunner comes to the platoon command vehicle as soon as able.
    Someone on Charlie net: No need to worry about that. Charlie Vehicle 1 just got blown to fuck.
    Dslyecxi: Copy. Do we have any idea where that came from? Also, P.S., they deserved it.
  • A truly epic example of near-instant and incredibly precise poetic justice in Dslyecxi's Being John Kevbovich, where he is playing a Platoon Medic following PLT Kevb0 around. At one point, when the two find themselves alone and taking cover behind a ruined building, Kevb0 spots a lone enemy soldier (Taconic) retreating across an open field in the distance, in plain view. Despite the fact that they both realize how desperate he must have been to attempt such a retreat, Kevb0 and Dslyecxi mercilessly take pot shots at him to pin him down right in the middle of that field (where he has absolutely nowhere to go and nothing to do about it), while laughing and enjoying themselves thoroughly. Once Taconic is finally dead, Dslyecxi wonders out loud what could drive someone to make such an obviously desperate move.
    Not two minutes pass before Kevb0 foolishly decides that he and Dslyecxi will dash across an open field themselves, towards a house further up the road. Kevb0 is shot and killed halfway across the field, and Dslyecxi is left all alone in that house, with the enemy knowing that he's there. End of video.
  • In Taconic's FAC Tanoa, Chris(CHA) is panicked by the chaos of jungle combat, and accidentally guns down PLT Morgan. Dslyecxi decides that Chris will be punished for this by having to stay behind to distract the enemy as the rest of the platoon moves to the extraction point - which means certain death. In an incredibly unfortunate turn of events, a few minutes later Dslyecxi suddenly finds himself at the very rear end of the platoon, having to fight off the encroaching Vietnamese pursuit almost on his own — until he is finally shot and killed.
    • And in a second and reversed strike of Laser Guided Karma, Word of God says that that the replay showed Chris didn't kill Morgan after all, and that he got into the extraction chopper safe and sound.
• Last Stand: In Adversarial mode, the defenders will always designate a location (referred to as the "Alamo") where their final defense will take place - assuming they can even get back to it without being wiped out first. They will generally fight to the death there, and will often make the attackers pay dearly before the end. Also occurs in a few Cooperative missions featuring a progressive retreat, but these are much rarer.
• Last Words: The group has had some doozies over the years.
  • The best might come from Beagle in ShackTac's Last Breath, where he is gunned down literally seconds after casually saying "See you on the other side" to Black Dragon.
  • Taconic does his best to top Beagle in Guests, when he is shot and killed immediately after calling out "You can still surrender!" to enemies that are besieging his team. Apparently they weren't inclined to take him up on that offer.
  • Just barely averted in Why Did I Say That? by Mr. H. At the start of the video, when he sees a friendly chopper attempting to shoot down an enemy helicopter, Mr. H cynically predicts that the enemy helicopter will be shot down right on top of them. Less than 2 minutes later the damaged and out of control enemy helicopter does crash pretty much right on top of them, and several members of the group only survive because they were standing in a shallow ditch and so the helicopter rolled over and then past them after smashing into the ground. It's practically a miracle that none of them died, especially the guys in the ditch, since the only reason they were in that ditch was because they were moving from one location to another, so if the helicopter had crashed either a few seconds earlier or later they would not have protected from the crash.
• Lured into a Trap: Dslyecxi is very good at these, and has utilized a variety of different lures in different situations over the years.
  • Dslyecxi creates himself a Decoy Damsel for this purpose, during Speak ONLY When Spoken To. First, he captures and disarms an enemy combatant. Then, he promises the prisoner that he's not going to be harmed if he does what Dslyecxi says, and instructs him to call the circling Mi-8 helicopter to land near his position to pick him up. The prisoner complies, and when the helo lands, Dslyecxi hits it with a rocket.
  • BlackDragon performs this almost on a whim in Dslyecxi's video Oh Schro You Don't.... BLUFOR (the enemy) complete their objectives and begin to withdraw towards their helicopter pick-up zone, unaware that OPFOR's MMG team (Jive and Dslyecxi) have circled behind them and positioned themselves to cut off the retreat. BlackDragon then has the brilliant idea to throw smoke grenades into an open field close to BLUFOR's location (and in open view of the MMG), to make the pick-up helicopter believe that his guys on the ground need emergency extract at that location. When the helicopter lands, MMG rips it to shreds.
  • The Silver Briefcase is a 40-minute-long episode where Dslyecxi does nothing but this. As a hostage, he lures his captors into one death-trap after another, until they are all dead. And he does this purely by improvising as he goes.
• MacGuffin-Person Reveal: Dslyecxi gets himself rescued in The Silver Briefcase by convincing his captors that the eponymous briefcase is a MacGuffin they desperately need, if they want to win the mission. This devious lie was meant only to distract them from the fact that he and his friends are the real MacGuffin.
• Made of Iron: Shack Tac's customized system for treating injuries makes it entirely possible for a single player to not only live through dozens of injuries that would be debilitating in real life, but to also continue to perform on the battlefield all the while. Picking up enough injuries will eventually effect the performance of their character, for example a character might wind up with a limp or be prone to passing out without warning. Since Shack Tac also tends to stick to a policy that a player only gets one life in a mission and once they get killed, they're out, it makes sense that they try to make characters as tough to kill as possible.
• Manipulative Bastard: Almost every member in ShackTac will end up being this at one point or another, but Dslyecxi again takes the cake for being both relentless and extremely good at it. He will happily manipulate both enemies and friends, for a wide variety of possible reasons.
  • The most elaborate trick Dslyecxi had ever pulled on anyone was The Silver Briefcase. In this video, Dslyecxi is a rocket scientist captured by a group of independents, in the hope that he can help them launch a SCUD missile at the capital city. He can't help them, but he knows that they think he can. Using this knowledge, he convinces the independents' leadership that he had stashed a silver briefcase somewhere outside their compound, and that it is a necessary component for the launch. He then leads them out to the supposed stash, and straight towards the approaching BLUFOR platoon coming to rescue him. With one brilliantly-improvised lie after another, he leads his captors into every trap possible in order to get them gunned down, one at a time, by BLUFOR — until not a single one remains.
  • Dslyecxi's finest and most famous example is John's Introduction to ShackTac. In this video, he is an insurgent who has come up on a BLUFOR unit that's been all but annihilated. The only survivor, a pFNG named John, is unconscious and wounded. Dslyecxi disarms and then treats him, and retreats into cover before John wakes up. Safely concealed from John, he tells him that he is a friendly survivor, and begins to milk him for information. Poor John divulges the location of the rest of BLUFOR, before finally figuring out that Dslyecxi might be an enemy. Dslyecxi then shoots him in the face.
    Dslyecxi: Welcome to ShackTac.
    *Rat-tat-tat-tat*
  • At the start of Sit With Me, Dslyecxi is tasked with guarding a pair of hostages, during an assault by a large enemy force that's coming to rescue them. Although he doesn't have clearance to execute the hostages, he pretends to have a radio conversation in order to convince them that he does. Under this threat, he instructs them to exchange their clothes with his, one piece at a time, until they end up looking like OPFOR soldiers and he ends up looking like a hostage. He then instructs them to stand in a window, and fires out of it at the approaching BLUFOR troops, to try to get BLUFOR to shoot the hostages. Although neither of the hostages are killed, Dslyecxi does end up winning the mission thanks to this gambit.
• Mind Screw: In-Universe.
  • Dslyecxi loves doing this when he is in his special spectator mode, which allows him to film the action without having a physical avatar in the game (but still being able to interact with the other players in some way).
    • In The Journey of a Thousand Miles, he takes advantage of the fact that his invisible camera has a collision box, to push Kevb0 and others around, to make it look like they're sliding for no apparent reason.
    • In Nomads, the first 2/3 of the video is a straightforward cinematic view of a commando raid. Just as the players start to wind down from a tough battle, Dslyecxi begins to whisper to them.
  • At the start of HMMWV Shock Force, the entire platoon is driving into the battlefield in a massive vehicle convoy. Then Dslyecxi types this into the chat:
    Dslyecxi (typing): Intel reports that there may be mines, btw. Or possibly IEDs. They're not quite sure.
    [Entire convoy becomes skittish and slows down, then completely stops in front of a large field]
    HMMWV driver: Why do i have the feeling we're driving towards a mine field?
    Dslyecxi (to the YouTube audience): What the ShackTac platoon doesn't know is that I secretly haven't placed any mines or IEDs! I just want them to be paranoid.
  • During the boring waiting period at the start of one mission, Dslyecxi decided to mess with Jamball by repeatedly changing her in-game avatar's face. Then we learn that from her perspective, absolutely everyone around her looked like they were wearing Dslyecxi's face.
• More Dakka: Extremely rare, as conservation of ammo is usually incredibly important. A unit may be ordered to pour some of its ammo on the enemy for a tactical purpose, but this is rare. Then again, sometimes More Dakka is the solution nonetheless.
  • In John... Rambo?, Dslyecxi fires a machine gun from the hip on full-auto, to try and neutralize several imminent threats to LordoftheT's survival.
  • The highlight video Fuck Those Guys, where Dslyecxi unloads an entire 200-round magazine at an enemy-occupied hill. Word of God says it paid off.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Beagle's reaction about eleven minutes into "Zombies of Zargabad," after using an incendiary grenade on a mob of dozens and dozens of zombies packed in front of a mosque. The end result is a second sun, a chorus of unending screams, a teammate who chooses to fall into the fire, and a hysterically laugh-sobbing Beaglerush. By the end he declares "there's no going back for me" and volunteers to stay behind while other survivors escape.
  Beagle: Oh my god... oh my gah-hah-had... what have I done?!
  Jamball: (over radio) Where are you?
  Beagle: I'm in hell!
• My Nayme Is: Dslyecxi, which is of course a pun.^note it's how a dyslexic person might spell "dyslexic" Not really unpronounceable though - the others simply pronounce it "Dis-lexi".
• New Meat: The technical term is "pFNG" ^note which stands for "potential Fucking-New-Guy" or "pre Fucking-New-Guy". These are guys who have joined the unit recently (several months in), and still have to get used to both the customized gameplay (thanks to many unique ShackTac mods) and to all the other tropes listed on this page.
  • New guys are recruited in waves, so shortly after the most recent wave, ShackTac will run a "pFNG session", which is a mission or series of missions intended to introduce the new guys in. These missions tend to be very big (give or take 100 people), cooperative missions, which normally involves an infantry offensive against a series of targets. Many will die, but the missions are usually winnable.
  • Shortly after the pFNG sessions, most pFNGs will either never be seen again, or Take a Level in Badass.
  • Getting one's pFNGs alive to the end of the mission is a mark of honor for the veteran element leaders, up to the point where they might even sacrifice themselves to protect the last one.
    • In Strait Shot, and the accompanying video Decyphering the Area, Dslyecxi's pFNG, Cypher, actually makes it out alive without the rest of his team!
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • In Jumpin' Into It, Delta squad runs out of explosives on the way to the final objective (an artillery battery) that they are tasked with destroying. They ask Dslyecxi, who is the fireteam leader of Alpha 2, to give them some of his team's anti-tank launchers to complete the task, which he grudgingly does. Not a minute after Delta takes off towards their objective, Alpha 2 is set upon by multiple BMPs, with only one AT rocket to defend themselves.^note  And the shot misses.
    • After the BMPs drive off, Alpha 2 manages to scrounge up a few more rockets for themselves. But then Delta fails to destroy the artillery, and Alpha 2 has to go up there and hit it with those rockets. This is when the enemy decides to counter-attack, and destroys Dslyecxi's team.]
• Non-Specifically Foreign: In SHACKCOPS 3, after having executed two civilians they had pulled over, Beagle's police unit stops Priest, who is playing a nondescript Eurotrash backpacker.
  Beagle: Who the fuck is this? Sir, sir, sir.
  Priest: I bring wiener schnitzel from ze Deutschland!
  Beagle: Sir, you are very foreign. You are very foreign, sir. Calm down.
  Priest: I come visiting my uncle, officer.
  Beagle: Sir, you have long, unkempt hair, you have devil music on your shirt, you're wearing a scarf, you have make up on... Sir, your glasses are very feminine. What are you doing here?
• No One Gets Left Behind: Well, most of the time. Shackers do their best to help the wounded, and sometimes even to retrieve their bodies, but in some situations the risk is simply too great, and people do get abandoned.
  • As Dslyecxi cautions, Mind Where You Fall.
  • One exception to the rule is S.H.A.C.K.E.R, ShackTac's flagship zombie mission. There's safety in numbers, but in the end, the group won't stop to help you, especially if they are all being chased by a zombie horde.
  • When Cappy is run over by an enemy vehicle in Absolute Madness, his medical diagnosis is so hopeless that the Alpha survivors consider leaving him there to die instead of wasting bandages on him. Nevertheless, they manage to get him into their vehicle and spend a metric ton of bandages trying to stop his bleeding. In the end he is left to die at the extract point, but only because an enemy vehicle rams the UAZ he's in so hard that his still-bleeding body mysteriously disappears.
    • In the same mission, Alpha leaves their own rescuers behind to die in the jungle, and are in fact the only unit to make it out of the jungle alive. Of course, doing otherwise would have been a guaranteed suicide.
• No One Should Survive That!: Since this is a video-game, a variety of bugs and glitches can cause this in all sorts of circumstances. And ArmA has no lack of bugs and glitches. At other times, it's nothing but sheer f*ing luck.
  • In To the Last, Dslyecxi turns around in time to see an RPG directly hit Sixty40's position. When the smoke clears, Sixty is inexplicably fine.
  • An unconventional example in HMMWV Shock Force. The platoon, in a convoy of light vehicles, drives into an open field and encounters a powerful enemy force, which destroyes nearly all of its vehicles. Dslyecxi drives his surviving HMMWV around to pick people up and move them forward to safety, but then spots the company M113 armored vehicle sitting in the field, apparently unscathed. This becomes his vehicle for the remainder of the mission. Throughout the rest of the mission we hear many comments from the others about how that M113 should not have survived.
  • In Tap Tap in Drip Drip, Dslyecxi and his fireteam are holed up in a building, under attack by BMPs. Several BMP cannon shells hit the building, and the top floor violently collapses in a cloud of debris. Dslyecxi looks upstairs at the devastation, and worriedly calls out "Is anyone still upstairs?", expecting no answer. Then Rspctd comes running around the corner and down the stairs. No explanation on how he survived that.
  • In Too Hot to FAC, Dslyecxi finds himself on foot, all alone, on a hill, with several T-72 tanks right on top of his position. Being the FAC in this mission, he proceeds to call in air support on his own position. As the tanks are hit by the helicopters, Dslyecxi has to also fight off enemy crewmen dismounting and attacking him. He survives all this.
  • In John... Rambo?, despite Dslyecxi's warnings, LordoftheT rushes rather foolishly across an alleyway guarded by enemy infantry and a DShK technical. A hail of fire comes his way as he crosses into what seems to be no cover at all on the other side. In a desperate attempt to help him, Dslyecxi sprays the fuck out of the alleyway with his machinegun for what seems like an eternity, and then runs over to check LordoftheT, who's just... fine.
    Dslyecxi: You are one lucky motherfucker.
  • In Strongpoint Giggles, Dslyecxi's team heavily fortifies the building they're defending with sandbags, barbed wire, and concrete barriers. In response, the enemy chooses to RPG the building, which ultimately comes down on top of the occupants - but due to a weird glitch fails to kill any of them.
  • During Hell of an Exit Dslyecxi watches as an RPG flies towards him, passes between his legs, and explodes only a couple of feet behind him. He survives this.
  • Absolute Madness is the story of Dslyecxi, Chris(CHA) and Ghostboots repeatedly surviving one completely hopeless situation after another for over an hour. Along with KnightDefender, they end up being the Platoon's only survivors.
    • In the same mission, Cappy's accident.
      KnightDefender: I'm confused as to why he's not dead. There are so many holes in his body.
      Chris(CHA): To be fair, they're not holes. He got slammed at full speed by a UAZ.
      Dslyecxi: Everything is broken.
  • In Cut Off, Dslyecxi takes the initiative in planting some remote-detonated explosives as his squad withdraws from an objective, running away from a chasing BTR. He steals a small UAZ and stops it a few dozen meters from the objective to jump out and detonate the explosives. As he re-enters the car to drive away with the rest of his squad, the BTR suddenly shows up and cuts him off - but somehow doesn't pepper the crap out of his UAZ. Driving away frantically, he ends up driving into the advancing enemy lines, but isn't killed in the cross-fire. He quickly turns around and drives back to a friendly position, where friendly fire takes out his UAZ, so he jumps in another one and goes right back out there to link up with his squad. His UAZ gets shot again, and a freak accident takes out most of his tires. Several enemies overrun his cut off position, so he has to fight them while patching himself up and changing the tires. The car still won't go, and the enemy engages him while he's completely out in the open. He defeats those enemies and then runs towards his squad on foot, linking up with them just in time to help them through a "Mass Casualty" situation. Unfortunately he dies later on, but surviving that ordeal was nothing short of a miracle.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Tight Net is a Dslyecxi video from one of the Caesar Merlin missions, where he is playing one of the escaping soldiers. It is around 20 minutes long. At around the 7 minute mark, he is captured by the Russians. The remainder of the video is pretty much nothing but an eventless jeep ride to the Russians' prisoner collection point - which nonetheless manages to be incredibly intense and nerve-wracking.
• Obfuscating Insanity:
  • CHKilroy employs this in Professional Hostage Services, $50/hr, to try to get his captors to drop their guard. It works.
  • He does the same thing again in Midnight Speech. It works again.
• One-Man Army: Dslyecxi is dreaded throughout the Shack Tactical community for single handedly killing entire squads of enemy players.
  • Displayed marvelously in Way of the Ninja. Dslyecxi is a machine-gunner attempting to take the enemy by surprise in order to delay them. When he is spotted and his assistant killed, Dslyecxi sneaks into concealment and then proceeds to shadow the enemy team, killing several of them each time, until the remnants of their unit finally manage to kill him almost by chance. The confusion he managed to sow in their ranks, however, lingers on even after he dies: The enemy friendly-fire some of their own, thinking they are him.
  • Another example in The Battling Bravo Bastards of Berezniki, where Dslyecxi not only reads the map brilliantly and anticipates the enemy's movements well beforehand, but then goes on to annihilate a squad of enemies (~14 people) pretty much all on his own.
  • The compilation video Dslyecxi and his Magic Hacks is dedicated to showcasing this. It's made up of spectator footage of Dslyecxi being a ninja and killing way more people than should've been possible.
    Awo: You can only kill him by cutting off the head.
  • In Making Lemonade, Dslyecxi makes a hasty move, which later allows him to flank and destroy an entire enemy fireteam, solo, before finally being spotted and gunned down.
  • The very next video, An Excercise in Patience, has Dslyecxi lead a much larger but equally effective flanking maneuver, even though most of his team gets wiped out early on.
  • Blue Thorn, where Dslyecxi's squad flanks the enemy and decimates them. Even though the team does spectacular work themselves, Dslyecxi alone takes out at least a squad of enemies with his uncanny GP fire.
  • Moonlit Granate. While defending a town, Dslyecxi's team gets whittled down and pulls back deeper into the town, leaving him alone inside a building situated directly in the path of the enemy attack. So, he blunts the attack.
  • At the very beginning of Redcon, Dslyecxi's fireteam stumbles right into an enemy-occupied compound, and within a few dozen seconds Dslyecxi is the only one left alive. He plays a game of cat-and-mouse with the enemy, and eventually clears the compound. He then assaults another compound, clearing it too, and kills several more enemies from its rooftop. Finally, when the enemy complete their mission and drive off, he picks up one of the vehicles they had left behind, chases them right to their exfiltration area, and stages a Suicide Attack in which he kills several of them before being gunned down. ^note Muffalopadus and SlappyMoose participated to some extent in all of this, but the bulk of the work was Dslyecxi operating alone
  • Dslyecxi again, in Silent Night. He spends the entire 26 minutes of this video taking a run through a snowy, dense, moonlit forest, stalking and assassinating the enemy as they try to breach into a friendly-held factory compound. Darting from shadow to shadow and always waiting for the right moment, he manages to kill well more than half a dozen of them, one after another. Most of them with a single bullet to the back of the head.
  • Beagle manages to pull this off in his video Last Stand, where he is hiding behind a rock, alone, on an open plateau, with an enemy squad attempting to assault his position along with AH-6 support. By the end of the video, the field in front of him is practically littered with enemy bodies.
    Beagle (shouting at the enemy): Come on then, if you think you're hard enough!
• Only Mostly Dead: In the ArmA 2 ACE mod and ShackTac ArmA 3 medical system, getting shot does not always equal death - a player may "pass out", requiring medical attention to bring them back to the fight. The troops must check fallen friendly bodies to see whether they are still alive.
  • Even seemingly serious injuries could be treated in ACE, as seen in CHKilroy's video War is Kind of Funny, where Hunterhr gets shot repeatedly and keeps being brought back by Dslyecxi.
  • There are multiple moments during Absolute Madness where someone gets injured so badly that their medical diagnosis screen shows a whole litany of colorful injury entries to every bodypart. This culminates with Cappy getting run over by an enemy vehicle and being dragged for 25 meters underneath it. In all cases, these hopelessly injured people are saved from death ( or in Cappy's case, could have been saved had the rescuers had more bandages).
    Dslyecxi: There was just a giant bloody smear on the ground where Cappy got hit.
• Perspective Flip: Part of the fun of viewing the archive of Shack Tac videos is seeing the same missions from different points of view. Sometimes, in adversarial or multisided missions like "Dark Business" videos, it's practically required to see videos from different sides in order to understand everything that is going on. Other times, videos from different fire teams or squads on the same side will give a better perspective on what's happening. For example, this video from Mr. H shows his attempts to keep his shattered squad from being totally wiped out by tanks, while this one from Taconic shows his would-be rescuers trying to reach them, but having to give up once half their team is killed and multiple tanks are still in the area.
• Pet the Dog: In So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World, (a DayZ video) a sniper has set up shop and is potshotting at players for no reason other than pad a kill count. (As much as Dslyecxi loathes snipers, it's this exact style of play that drives him completely out of his mind.) Dslyecxi, normally known for being a Manipulative Bastard extraordinaire, is so pissed by this that he starts giving out equipment, guns, and supplies to everyone he runs into, then goes to hunt down the sniper, by now equipped with nothing other than a t-shirt, pants, and a pistol. Despite fully intending his bit of sniper hunting to be a Suicide Mission, Dslyecxi manages to find the sniper's position, sneak up on him, and kill him.
• Player Versus Player: Roughly half of all videos released by Shackers on YouTube feature this style of missions (called "Adversarial" missions), as opposed to playing cooperatively against the AI (called "Cooperative" missions). In most Adversarials, one side will be defending a small area of the map (and possibly some important assets or hostages), while the other side will be assaulting them. The defending side generally has around 1/2 as many soldiers as the attacking side, but will have a much better position to use as a force multiplier - giving an overall balanced game that could end with victory for either side. Adversarials tend to be relatively shorter missions (30-60 minutes on average, as opposed to several hours), and feature a much smaller-scale than Cooperatives (a hundred players fighting against each other, as opposed to a hundred players fighting against hundreds of AI soldiers). Heavy assets are also less likely to be used, as they tend to tip the balance too easily to one side.
  • Of course, the most beloved missions in ShackTac history have generally been the Adversarial missions involving three or more sides (BLUFOR, OPFOR, and the Independents and/or Hostages), including Dark Business, Caesar Merlin, Warmth, Cinder City, and so on. Three sides offer a wealth of options for alliances, double-dealings, and other unexpected outcomes, often making these missions much more exciting than just "side A vs. side B".
  • Another crowd-favorite Adversarial mission is The Game. In this game mode, which is heavily based on the indie video game The Ship, each participant is assigned another person as their target, and much then seek out and kill that target before the time runs out. If they do, they get a new target and some extra time. The last person alive wins. And to make it more difficult (because of course), some of the players take the role of policemen who patrol the map and try to catch people red-handed as they commit their crimes.
• Police Are Useless: During The Game, the police are ostensibly there to stop players from murdering one another. In actuality, they are likely to do one of three things: 1) Needlessly harass people at checkpoints; 2) Help people murder one another; or 3) Murder players. Even when they do try to help, the police are hopelessly understaffed considering the massive size of the map, and players usually have no qualms about killing lone police officers if the opportunity and need arises.

  Officer Beagle: We're swimming in the eco-system. We are like park rangers more than policemen.

• Police Brutality: The cops will occasionally do this during The Game, and are practically guaranteed to do this if Beagle is their commanding officer.
  • Since they are not allowed to directly shoot any civilians without legal justification, most often they will find a way to indirectly set them on fire.
• Poor Communication Kills: It doesn't happen often, due to the professional communications, but when it happens you'll know.
  • In CHKilroy's Grishino Deploy Assault, what looks like a winning move by BLUFOR quickly turns into an embarrassing loss due to failure to obey a single, simple command.
  • Beagle attempting to give the go-code in Calgon Business. The trouble here is that Beagle had to give the go-code right in front of soldiers from an opposing faction that he had been negotiating with, so it had to be something that might sound legit to them and wouldn't tip them off right away. ("Bring him down", as in, bring the hostage down to be exchanged). Except by the time Beagle actually says the code phrase, he's been negotiating with the other side for long enough that between that and the ambiguous code phrase, Calgon isn't sure that Beagle actually is giving the code or if he's genuinely going through with the exchange. Beagle has to reassure Calgon and give the code phrase several times, raising suspicion among members of the other side. When Calgon starts making his move, Beagle is quickly gunned down.
    Beagle: [Summing up the sequence of events afterward] I'm standing in front of two enemies, and Calgon is like 'Should I steal the truck?' I'm like 'Yes, you should, bring him down.' And Calgon's like 'Oh, I should wait because we're bringing the hostage down?' And I'm like 'No, you're misunderstanding me...'
  • This exchange from I've Done a Bad Thing:
    [Dslyecxi and Taconic are cooped up in a bunker, with enemies potentially all around]
    Dslyecxi: See that guy running past, wearing a crewman's gear? It's worth being concerned about.
    * Taconic shoots and kills the guy he was pointing at*
    Taconic: I thought I had killed them all.
    Dslyecxi meant that there's reason to be concerned that one of their own crewmen is running around without his vehicle. Whoops.
  • Too Hot to FAC features one of these on a massive scale. This is the first time we've seen ShackTac play as an armored battalion in a co-op mission. From both the transmissions we can hear, as well as the first-hand accounts from Morgan and Tiberian, the battalion and company radio nets were a huge clusterf*ck from the get-go. People weren't even sure which channel they were using. Then COY Kevb0 got killed on first contact, and from there on the mission only spiraled down into the inevitable disaster that it was.
    • In the same mission, Dslyecxi (playing as FAC) inverts the trope by staying so well-communicated with his helicopters that he manages to guide them into destroying several enemy tanks right on top of his position - without getting himself killed in the process.
  • Three POV CAS Strike shows us what happens when communications between the Forward Air Controller and all of the ground units are not carried out as carefully as they should. He orders a bomb strike directly on a friendly unit, which gets annihilated.
  • Language Barrier was the first ShackTac video to utilize the "Babel" feature of the ACRE mod, which scrambles the voices of people on different teams in order to simulate a language barrier (between people who, in real life, speak the same language). This resulted in a great deal of frustration for the Independents, whose job was to convince BLUFOR to go in a different direction than the one they were heading in. By the time the Independents managed to convey their intent to BLUFOR to any significant degree, the platoon was already surrounded by enemies. There were no survivors.
  • Dslyecxi's second "hindsight" video Airfield Assault is an in-depth breakdown of how this can happen. Long story shortish, Alpha and Bravo are attacking from two different directions, against an airfield with multiple buildings. Alpha gets bogged down and takes significant casualties early, but due to mix ups on the coms about which buildings are taken and how far Alpha has been able to advance, the two groups fail to assist each other or coordinate properly. (In fact, Bravo even assumes for a long time that a building occupied by enemies is instead occupied by Alpha, and the occasional enemy fire coming at them is actually Alpha trying to support them by shooting past them at other targets. This confusion also spreads through the ranks and throws off both Dslyecxi in his air support helicopter and the FAC.) And on top of that, FAC's attempts to relay messages or clarify what is going on get garbled and turned on their head because Alpha is seldom answering radio calls due to their losses and heavy engagement, so by the time communication is established, messages are no longer relevant or FAC has forgotten exactly what was said and passes messages along incorrectly. The result is a gradually worsening situation that suddenly turns into a disaster, both groups get chewed up with few survivors, and a second platoon needs to come in before the airfield is cleared.
  • Civil Affairs ends with a series of seemingly-minor miscommunications that all contributes to several people dying at the very end. For example, he names the pickup zone "Pickup Zone" instead of giving it a more unique name, which confuses some players who thought the pickup zone is where the helicopters have been landing throughout the entire mission. This is further discussed in the "hindsight" video Hindsight: Hot Extraction.
• Private Military Contractors: One of the ARMA factions, used extensively in Shack Tactical. People playing PMCs tend to role-play them as self-interested and unscrupulous - concerned only with completing their mission, up to and including the murder of civilians if they feel it's necessary.
• Pyrrhic Victory: ShackTac missions rarely end well for anyone involved. If a Total Party Kill does not occur, it is likely that victory will still come at the cost of the vast majority of the winning side. This is true both during Adversarial and Cooperative missions. Note however that in Cooperative missions it is far less likely that anyone will make it out alive if the number of friendly soldiers drops very low, as a Diabolus ex Machina will likely show up to eliminate the survivors quickly, so that a new mission can be started.
  • Dslyecxi named one of his missions Pyrrhus, BSL, in reference to this trope. The victory is indeed Pyrrhic, as all of the attackers are killed shortly after completing their primary objective.
  • Absolute Madness ends with only three men from the original platoon, and one from the rescue platoon sent to retrieve them making it out alive.
• Red Herring: The Silver Briefcase is one, provided by Dslyecxi to his captors in order to get them to take him on a little walk (during which he plans to escape). They take the bait, though it's mostly because they know it'll be a fun ride.
• Revised Ending: Best Possible Outcome is a short video where Dslyecxi and company are trying to take a compound and clear out some buildings. It starts off rather well for them... until they try to clear a room, and a glitch in Shack Tac's grenade system causes a grenade thrown into the room to teleport back to Dslyecxi's feet and explode there. Dslyecxi's narration acknowledges that the video ending like that after just over 5 minutes of action is pretty underwhelming, so he creates a different version, where he and two other Shackers storm the room, shoot the enemy inside at least fifty times while rock music plays loudly, then they run out and shortly afterward the entire building explodes dramatically behind them.
  Youtube Comment: If Michael Bay directed Arma...
• Risking the King: Kevb0's modus operandi. Even when leading the entire Platoon/Company, he is unlikely to stay out of combat for long. To make matters worse, Kevb0 is not exactly known for being cautious.
• Robbing the Dead: If someone goes down in an accessible position, others will quickly move to loot his corpse. Their survival may depend on it. Shackers use a lot of discretion in deciding what to take from the body, so as to take only what they absolutely need, and leave the rest for others. A body will usually be picked clean very quickly, leaving only clothes and redundant items.
  • When Rooster goes down in D.E.A.D. Patrol, Dslyecxi has this to say:
    Dslyecxi: Take his weapon. Take his stuff. Take his wallet!
  • In Healthy Paranoia, after a massive explosion goes off nearby, Beagle staggers out of a building to find a gruesome scene of several dead cops lying on the ground outside.
    Beagle: Oh my god, free guns.
• The Roleplayer: Players are very much encouraged to be this, and discouraged from straying outside certain justifiable boundaries of their roles. At its most basic, this rule ensures that everyone behaves like a soldier would, usually (but not always) fighting to the death and protecting their comrades with their lives if necessary. However the rule becomes much more important whenever hostages, journalists, guerrillas, terrorists, PMCs, UN troops, and any other non-standard roles are involved. Enforcement of this rule is one of the ways ShackTac reduces some of the chaos often involved in FPS games, while simultaneously making it possible to create coherent and engaging stories to enjoy.
  • A good example of this is Biting Cold, Dslyecxi's POV of ShackTac's first zombie mission in ArmA 3. Pretty much everybody is role-playing and staying in-character here, to set the mood and avoid breaking immersion. In contrast, Taconic's POV of the same mission (Awfully Familiar) shows another group that was almost totally out-of-character the entire time. Despite it being the same exact mission, the contrast between these two POVs is quite striking.
  • In Cheese Bits, Chris(CHA)'s character wears a full EOD face mask. To simulate what that would be like, Chris fixed a cup to his microphone with a rubber band, and speaks into the cup throughout the entire episode - much to Dslyecxi's chagrin.
• Self-Destructive Charge: Bricks' charge towards the airfield, at the end of BMD Rally, Part 2. The company's surviving Armored Personnel Carriers, along with what's left of the mechanized infantry, make a final 700m push towards their ultimate objective. Bricks himself is mowed down in slow-motion half-way through, but a vehicle and a few men actually make it, winning the mission.
• Serious Business / Rule of Fun: The two halves of the team's creed.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In Saving the Day, Dslyecxi and squad have been fleeing through a jungle. They make a stand in a village with a bunker, with Dslyecxi outside firing on enemy troops while the rest of the group takes refuge in the bunker. Then an enemy vehicle rolls up and starts spraying down the bunker with machine gun fire. Despite prior wounds and being seriously wounded again, (to the point where he keeps passing in and out of consciousness) Dslyecxi first manages to shoot out the tires of the vehicle and then destroy it. He staggers back to the bunker to celebrate with everyone about how the day is saved... and finds that everyone in the bunker was killed by the heavy machine gun fire.
  Dslyecxi: [Fires on the vehicle until it suddenly bursts into flame] I-I did it! I did it, guys! I saved us! ... guys? [Passes out, regains consciousness, then reaches the bunker and sees all the bodies inside] O-oh noooooo. Fuck.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: After falling behind his team for a few minutes at the start of the mission in Lost & Confused, Kilroy catches up to discover that they've all been killed. He spends the rest of the mission pretending to be shell-shocked, and moaning to Dslyecxi about how he "couldn't save them". Then again, he took a long vacation from Shack Tactical only a couple of weeks later, so...
• Shoot Everything That Moves: Fire discipline and friend/foe identification is strictly observed, averting this trope... most of the time. Taconic's I've Done a Bad Thing shows one example of what happens when you don't double-check your targets.
• The Siege: Occurs often in Adversarial (PvP) missions, since the attackers often get a much larger force than the defenders. However it becomes a whole 'nother ballgame when the players are defending against AI, because there will be waves and waves of them. These missions are rarely designed to be winnable.
  • CHKilroy's Hill Defense is a good example - with the defenders getting massive fortification material and practically unlimited ammo - which doesn't help.
  • Sorry, So Sorry! was an adversarial siege so one sided in favor of the defenders that it causes Dslyecxi to say he feels sorry for the attackers several times throughout the mission, sometimes even as he's gunning them down. By the end, it's clear that the whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth.
  • Die Hardest is one of the most famous sieges Shack Tac ever played, with the complicating factor that the defenders are low on ammo and mostly trying to hold out long enough to escape with help of backup forces. The climax is pretty much pure awesome.
  • Shoots and Ladders features the Shackers playing as Secret Service agents against an AI enemy, and trying to protect the Vice President from being captured. They have to hole up in a small town, (most in the town's fire station) and attempt to hold out until they can be rescued by a Ranger detachment. The Vice President is kept safe, but only a single member of the Secret Service guard survives the siege.
• Shown Their Work: Dslyecxi has thousands of hours of flight time on ArmA helicopters, and will often deliberately show off those skills, to remind us that he's simply the best.
  • Four on the Floor is full of this, but particularly the maneuver at the very end. All four littlebirds manage to land on that one roof, but Dslyecxi perches his littlebird on a ledge.
• Smurfing: Beagle's Team SPECTRE devolves into this, substituting "tango" for more and more of their words.
  Beagle (Tango Actual): There's a tango 500 tangos ahead, behind that tango.
  Taconic: I hear tangos to the northeast.
  Beagle: Tango that. I see a whole bunch of tangos across the river. [...] Alright, we're gonna move up through the low trees into that building and flank those tangos.
  Taconic: Tango Two tangos.
  TeaJay: Tango Three tangos.
  Soylent: Tango One also tangos.
  Beagle: Tango Team, cut the tango.
  Soylent: Smurf yeah.
• Soft Water:
  • At the end of First in Flight, Kevb0 orders Dslyecxi's Amtrack^note an AMphibious TRACKed fighting vehicle to load up some troops and withdraw from the top of the hill back down towards the shoreline. The road down (which they had spent most of the video driving up) is a steep slalom with lots of hard turns, making it difficult to navigate. So Kevb0 orders Dslyecxi to set a course directly towards the shoreline and hit the gas. The Amtrack jumps off a cliffside at top speed (taking its eponymous flight), and plunges straight into the water of the bay below, perfectly undamaged.
  • Advanced Assault Swan Divers begins on a friendly ship, with the unit's amphibious vehicles diving gracefully off the top deck straight into the ocean.
• Sole Survivor: In Shoots and Ladders, a team of Secret Service agents has to protect the Vice President from being killed or captured. Only one of the agents makes it to the end of the mission.
• Spider-Sense: The most veteran Shackers seem like they've developed a Spider Sense of sorts, and again, Dslyecxi has what can almost be described as a real-life, full-fledged Spider Sense. Of course, this is simply a result of them being skilled enough in tactics to instantly read the terrain and expect an ambush or assault, or to guess in advance what the Killer Game Master is about to throw at them. Occasionally, the Spider Sense manifests as a Five-Second Foreshadowing.
  • Harsh Winter:
    [The platoon dismounts from their vehicles and head into a snowy, dark, quiet forest]
    Dslyecxi: This is suspicious.
    [Three seconds later, they come into contact with an entire enemy squad that's in the process of flanking them]
  • In Dodging This, Dslyecxi literally dodges bullets thanks to this skill.
• Spiritual Successor: If you watch enough videos, you'll see that some videos can have strong parallels to past missions. Some might almost seem like a remake or recreation of a past mission. For example:
  • In Shooting Gallery a platoon gets overwhelmed by massive numbers, and after suffering heavy losses, they are forced to retreat to a beach where there is almost no cover and they have to hold out there while the remaining helicopters make a desperate attempt at a rescue. Five years later almost to the day in Beach Slapped, a platoon that has been overwhelmed by massive numbers suffers heavy casualties, and is forced to retreat to a beach that has almost no cover where they have to try to hold out while the remaining helicopters brave heavy fire and attempt a rescue. The way these two missions end is very, very different however. Shooting Gallery featured the pilots coming up with unorthodox tactics that allowed them to successfully extract most of the players who made it to the beach, complete with a heartwarming example of No One Gets Left Behind when Beagle refused to leave the last injured soldier behind to die and somehow saved him. Beach Slapped shows the enemy AI shooting down or blowing up every single helicopter that attempts to rescue the Shack Tac players, the rescue attempt fails, and everyone dies.
• Stuff Blowing Up:
  • The subject of the video Satchels for Everyone, which documents Dslyecxi's copious use of satchel charges in "The Game" scenarios.
  • The climax of Fire from the Sky, where BLUFOR's entire air support (consisting of two attack helicopters and an A-10) rains incredible amounts of explosive fire down on a Russian armored column, has become one of ShackTac's hall-of-fame moments. The entire segment is showcased in its own highlight video, Strike from the Sky, Brothers.
• Suicide Mission: The ending of Redcon has Dslyecxi performing one of these with SlappyMoose. They steal an enemy vehicle and use it to drive right up to the enemy's exfiltration point, taking out many of them before being gunned down.
• Super-Persistent Predator: In CHKilroy's I'm Sorry, Okay? Please Stop, Kilroy hits a tank with a rocket. The tank's machine gun then spends the next thirty seconds tracking a fleeing Kilroy and trying to gun him down, seemingly ignoring other, more stationary targets to do so. It does eventually get him.
  CHKilroy: This some bullshit!
• Super-Senses: Several of the Shackers are suspected of having these.
  • CHKilroy is known for his eagle eyes.
  • Not only is Taconic capable of hearing vehicles approaching from miles away, he is often able to tell what kind of vehicles they are, even at such distances. He can also differentiate between weapon models on hearing them firing a few times. But perhaps most incredibly, he can understand everything EvilScotsman says.
    • Dslyecxi ridicules him for it a few times during Stop When You're Dead.
      Taconic: I think we just had PKT^note Russian vehicle-mounted machine gun fire from the south-west.
      Dslyecxi: Can't you just call it machine-gun fire?
      Taconic: Well, PKT means a vehicle!
      Dslyecxi: Ugh.
      Burncycle: PKT-A2, I think.
      Dslyecxi: The fact that you can distinctly tell that is... it's not...
      Taconic: Well, PKT sounds slightly different.
      Dslyecxi: That one guy over there is firing a Yugoslavian AK with a forced receiver. I think it sounds like a 1978 or so.
    • And again during Self Rescue:
      Taconic: What the hell are they firing? I don't recognize the sound.
      Dslyecxi: You're talking about the enemy?
      Taconic: Yeah, what are they firing?
      Dslyecxi: You don't recognize the enemy's weapon?
      Taconic: No.
      Dslyecxi: Let me make sure I'm recording.
    • Another good example is an exchange from early in War Weary. As the squad is assaulting to retake a small hill, Taconic (who is way behind everybody else) is the first to realize that there is an enemy vehicle right behind that hill. He then identifies it as a BTR based on the sound of its bursts. Due to unexplained Genre Blindness, Cappy decides to instead report the vehicle on radio as a BMP - only to take that back after just a few seconds.
      Taconic: Called it!
    • In the 5th episode of Hindsight Dslyecxi mentions how a BRDM's PKT machine gun sounds similar to an infantry PKM. In the comment section, user djizomdjinn remarks: "It's a shame you didn't have Taconic in your squad, he could probably have told you the serial number of the BRDM off the sound of its machine gun."
  • Dslyecxi plays on such a huge monitor (30", ~1600p) that he can sometimes see enemies and other objects at incredible distances. Magic has not yet been ruled out though.
    • Demonstrated marvelously during Dodging This. Dslyecxi spots incoming MG fire from a building half a mile away, before the bullets even reach his position.
• Superstition Episode: Often happens whenever anyone decides to mention how lucky their team has been so far, or how few men they have lost so far, etc. ZX64 is a vengeful god.
  • Inverted with Ghostboots' Curse, which goes as follows: If Ghostboots and Dslyecxi are in the same unit, and Dslyecxi is leading that unit, then Ghostboots will stay alive as long as Dslyecxi is alive. The Curse worked perfectly for many months, even in videos where someone in the unit directly jinxed themselves (Tap Tap in Drip Drip and Rainy Round-Up). So, for a while, this superstition averted ShackTac's normal superstitions.
• Sympathy for the Devil: In Sorry, so sorry!, Dslyecxi's team is falls back to a defensive compound to try to hold it against an enemy assault. Said compound has only one entrance, walls that cannot be breached, defensive towers, and Dslyecxi's team has a plan for where and how to deploy themselves. The result is such a one-sided slaughter that on several occasions during the match Dslyecxi says he feels sorry for the other side. At least one other member of his team says something similar during the video, and when they ultimately win, Dslyecxi sounds disgusted about the whole thing.
  Dslyecxi: This is one of the most fucked up missions I've played in ArmA III.
• Tagalong Reporter: Of the worst kind. It never ends well, either.
  • CHKilroy and Bobik in Embedded with the Coast Guardsmen. They pester everybody they come across for interviews, even in the middle of combat.
  • CHKilroy and Beagle —errr— Chad Kilroy and Beags "Bobby" LeGaul in AAN Evening Report. Failing to get a scoop out of the soldiers they're with, they decide to pester the enemy instead. This gets them both killed.
• Temporal Paradox: Thanks to the weirdest bug ever, Beagle ends up confronting and murdering himself in DayZ Time Paradox.
• Tempting Fate: Commenting on how well your team has been doing so far in the mission is a good way to invoke the wrath of the gods, not to mention invoke the groans of your fellow team-members.
  • In FAC Tanoa, after taking the second out of three objectives in the deep jungle, Platoon Leader Morgan asks Taconic for his opinion on whether they should try to get the last objective, or extract from the combat zone before nightfall. Taconic says that they should go for the final objective, to which Morgan quickly agrees. Before he can even relay the order to the rest of the platoon, Morgan is shot dead by friendly fire, and Taconic (the new Platoon Leader) decides to extract from the combat zone before nightfall.
  • Done intentionally (complete with Lampshade Hanging) by Ghostboots in The Hubris of Ghostboots. As the mission is one of the Unwinnable by Design types where the Shackers are besieged by eternally respawning waves of enemies until they are overwhelmed, Ghostboots decided to go all in on tempting fate and does so an incredible number of times over the course of the video, between repeated boasting, repeatedly claiming that the tower that Ghostboots is using as his command center shall not fall, naming the tower Tower Hubris, etc. Not that any of this stops him from screaming in fright when things go wrong, and that in turn doesn't stop him from going back to boasting again afterwards.
  • In one mission, after taking a small fortification, Dslyecxi discovers that the D-30 field gun inside the fort is operable. He gets in, and begins to snipe groups of enemy infantry with 122mm High-Explosive shells at long range, blowing them to smithereens and enjoying every moment of it. He even mentions that he'd studied how to fire a field gun, but never thought he'd get to use one in action. When the Squad Leader informs everybody that they're going to be moving ahead in the vehicles, Dslyecxi mischiveously asks whether they can take the D-30 with them. Not only does Command approve of this idea, the others quickly determine that the game does indeed allows a D-30 to be loaded into one of the trucks. On the other hand, Dslyecxi is quite aware of how overpowered a mobile D-30 would be in their particular situation, and he figures they should probably leave it. GDR goads him to try it anyway ("What's the worst that could happen?"), prompting Dslyecxi to start reminiscing about another game that had great field artillery mechanics. It is at that point that Dslyecxi, still not 100% satisfied and brimming with excitement (as much as a Badass can be, anyway), hazards to ask whether the D-30 can be towed behind one of the vehicles. He receives the answer "yes". He then receives an RPG to the face. The title of the video? Worth it.
• Terrain Sculpting: Tanks and other heavy vehicles can knock down certain objects in the terrain, and sometimes this is done purposefully to get a clearer line of sight to where enemies might be.
  • In Very Successfully Preparing a Position, Dslyecxi has Crane drive their vehicle over some very-carefully-selected trees and walls in order to set up a nice position. Barring a little weird physics, it goes almost entirely according to plan.
  Dslyecxi: [Chuckling] "We've leveled literally everything except for the thing that I wanted to keep up, so that's great. And, no friendlies died during the creation of this position."
• That One Boss:
  • The AA emplacement at the end of CHKilroy's Mech Heist, which manages to bring the entire assault to a halt, and slaughter half of the remaining forces, before finally being taken out.invoked
  • Dslyecxi's Boss Battle, where the troops come across a single enemy in a barn who simply cannot be killed (but who can and does shoot back). Their attempts to kill him rapidly escalate from single shots, to bursts, to grenades, and finally rocket launchers, with no avail.
• That One Player: Dslyecxi is famous for his uncanny ability to single-handedly take down a ridiculous number of enemy soldiers, through a combination of stealth and manipulating game psychology, to the point that a running gag within the group is dslyecxi being a hacker and players ingame calling 'dslyecxi watch' when he is known to be in the area.
  • Exemplified in Sage Advice. Dslyecxi is part of a machine gun team, and Bravo squad has just linked up with them.
    Bravo 2 FTL: Bravo 2, make sure you can see the whole northwest and northern approach. I don't want fuckin'... Dslyecxi or anybody coming up behind us.
    Dslyecxi: [looks over towards Bravo 2] That's ok, I probably won't flank us.
  • During one run of Dark Business, while playing as a Russian soldier, Dslyecxi raced to a dark building soon to be occupied by the semi-hostile Independent forces. After spending some time running around amongst them in the darkness, he calmly walked right into the middle of a group of about six of them, and waited for them to notice him. Then, this exchange took place:
    [...After several moments of uncertainty...]
    IND Soldier: Hey, we have a Russian up here.
    Everyone takes a step forward.
    IND Soldier: It's Dslyecxi.
    Everyone takes a step back.
    Dslyecxi: I've been here the entire time, if that helps you sleep better.
    IND NCO: Jesus Christ.
  • Also from a few moments later in the same video, after Dslyecxi has been placed under close watch by several IND forces while waiting for the deal to go down:
    Dslyecxi: You guys need to relax. There's one of me, and there's, like, many of you.
    IND Guard: Yeah, there's one of you, but it only takes one of you to kill everyone.
  • Likewise, a cornered Dslyecxi is the most dangerous Dslyecxi.
• The Most Interesting Man in the World: Dslyecxi riffs on this at the end of CHKilroy Assassination Attempt
  Dslyecxi: I don't always friendly-fire, but when I do, I prefer CHKilroy.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In No Pressure, Taconic thought he was firing on maybe two tanks, and was planning to change position right after shooting a rocket at them and then try again. Just after firing, however, Taconic sees that he actually just fired at an entire tank column, with four or five visible. All of those tanks fire on Taconic's position as one before he even has a chance to move. After that barrage, it's probably safe to say that they couldn't find enough left of Taconic's body to fill a soup can.
  Player in chat: Oh fuck, man. He got annihilated by those tanks.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Everybody dies often, but some people die more often than others...
  • During the first decade or so of ShackTac YouTube uploads, Kevb0 died in almost every video in which he appeared. Usually, he got himself killed by charging at the enemy, or while standing in the open to observe enemy movement. He's gotten better at it since then.
  • Awo was also known for rarely making it through to the end of any mission. Like Kevb0, he has gotten a little better at surviving since then.
  • At the end of Tangos Down, when everyone's basically waiting for the mission to end:
    Dslyecxi: This is our limit of advance, so we're just waiting until the [other units] get their shit together.
    CraneSong: Alpha's over there, so that's to be expected.
    Dslyecxi: [*Checks the roster, sees Kevb0 is leading Bravo*] I mean, look at Alpha and Bravo. Well, actually, Bravo Lead is still alive, so that's... something.
    Worty: [*Laughs*] Oh, fuckin' Kevb0.
    Dslyecxi: We're probably playing this mission until we hear Kevb0's dead, and then it's over.
  • In mid-2021, Dslyecxi mentioned in a video that according to in-house record-keeping, MGbait is currently the player who has died the most times. This surprised no one.
• Think Nothing of It:
  • At the start of Celle Bridge Quick Clash, Dslyecxi has the idea to take his fireteam into the woods west of town, to defend the flank (an idea which pays off big-time later). He takes his team and spreads them out in the forest, then calls his commanding officer, Beagle:
    Dslyecxi: Dearest Beagle, this is Alpha 1.
    Beagle: Hello Dslyecxi.
    Dslyecxi: I have positioned my team, temporarily, on the north-west side of the town, to scout for [the enemy]. When we take contact, we will fall back towards our bunker.
    Beagle: That's an excellent idea, Alpha 1. Good work.
    Dslyecxi: I can't take credit for this, sir. You're the one who told me to do this.
    Beagle: Yes. Of course.
  • In Cold Roll, Dslyecxi's BMP-2 destroys an enemy vehicle that was about to kill Ghostboots. A few minutes later:
    Ghostboots: [On radio] Thanks for saving my life by killing that BMP, M-2.
    Dslyecxi: [On radio] You're welcome, it's all part of the job.
    Dslyecxi: [Off radio] We don't get to choose who we save.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • Dslyecxi has one of these moments in Redcon. After having placed a powerful mine on the road where the enemy convoy is expected to pass, Dslyecxi lingers in the area a little longer than he probably should have, when suddenly the enemy convoy shows up. With not enough time to get away, all he can do is hide in a bush a dozen meters from the mine, and watch Humvee after Humvee zoom past, awaiting the sudden explosion which would mean his death too. Seven Humvees pass. All seven miss the mine.
  • Another in Too Hot to FAC. Dslyecxi serves as a Forward Air Controller (FAC) for a couple of Apaches, in support of an armored company advance. While he is surveying the battlefield from behind a large rock atop a tall ridge occupied by friendlies, an enemy armored company begins to charge towards them across the wide valley. The friendly and enemy tanks exchange heavy fire with each other, but the enemy tanks draw ever closer. As enemy engine noises begin to be heard coming up the hill towards him, the friendly tanks begin to withdraw, leaving Dslyecxi all alone behind his rock in the face of the approaching enemy. He does his best to continue observing the battlefield, when suddenly a loud engine noise directly behind him draws his attention: An enemy T-72 right on top of him.
    [Beat]
    Dslyecxi [on Air net]: Well, it was nice knowin' you.
• Too Dumb to Live: In-Universe during Cambodian Road Trip. First off, Fearmeister and some of his teammates foolishly scout forward into some tall grass, smack into Dslyecxi's firing line. Unable to distinguish them from enemies in that patch of grass, Dslyecxi opens fire and hits Fearmeister. Ghostboots (the Medic) then has to run up there to bandage him under fire. When Fearmeister's all patched up, he runs back to the line, but despite Ghostboots' warning he gets himself severely injured by standing on a small patch of rocks.
  Ghostboots: How did you hurt yourself this much?! You know what, Dslyecxi? I'm starting to believe you didn't hit him with a single bullet.
• Tragic Keepsake: Since early 2017, Dslyecxi has consistently been taking Crane's watch off her body every single time she dies. Also, both Dslyecxi and Crane always take the automatic rifle off each other's bodies and use it to kill scores of enemies in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, but that's more of a rational combat decision than a purely sentimental gesture.
• Translator Buddy: Taconic to EvilScotsman.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Shackers die very often, and they tend to learn the lesson. That is, after all, one of the main advantages of a combat simulator like ARMA.
  • Explained by Dslyecxi himself in Ordinary Demi-Bradleys, after Crane tells Dslyecxi that she was reluctant to back up the Bradley for fear of running over nearby friendly infantry:
    Dslyecxi: Reversing in this kind of context, I think it's basically a free move. If anyone is dumb enough to be behind us in this kind of environment, they're doing it wrong. And that's how they learn the lesson!
• Troperiffic: Viewers have remarked that Beagle's "Zombies of Zargabad" video contains every zombie movie trope ever.
• Underestimating Badassery: Ghostboots has become ShackTac's semi-official Butt-Monkey. He receives a lot of shit-talk from the others, though mostly as response to the amount of shit he talks about others himself. In an in-universe meme, he has been nicknamed "Paper Bitch". Nonetheless, Ghostboots has an amazing tendency to survive very difficult combat situations - and entire missions - while displaying impressive abilities.
  • In the very same video that first featured the "Paper Bitch" meme, Hold Until Relieved, Ghostboots was the unit's last survivor, and managed to show off some incredible skills defending his position (to the death).
    Ghostboots: Get fucked!
    [Blows up a troop truck]
    Get fucked!
    [Blows up a tank]
• Unflinching Walk: One is deliberately orchestrated in Explosions. Guess who does the walk? Dslyecxi, of course.
• The Unintelligible: EvilScotsman, whom even other Scotsmen may have problems understanding. Fortunately, he usually has Taconic to translate for him.
• The Unpronounceable: Awoihjaweohr. ^note Or, Awo.
  • Dslyecxi jokingly attempted to pronounce it in the intro to Quiet Woodland Walk:
    Dslyecxi: Ah-woo-hey-jowah... or "Awo", as we prefer to call him...
• Unwinnable by Design: The Last Breath and Last Stand missions. They are gauntlets, with waves upon waves of AI-controlled enemies attempting to overwhelm a heavily-fortified position. The players are expected to give the best show they can before they inevitably die.
  • Dslyecxi's Last Breath begins by outright stating that the mission is unwinnable.
  • Any mission designed by Awo will be this. They contain a spectacular number of enemy assets that keeps escalating until all players are dead. Awo missions have been won in the past, but extremely rarely. One of his missions was designed to be so difficult that it ended before it even started.
• Uriah Gambit: Dslyecxi does this to Rouza, a pFNG, during Company of pFNGs, after Rouza says he is surprised to still be alive. As punishment for the sin of Tempting Fate, Dslyecxi asks Phil to specifically put Rouza on point during a charge across some open ground. Dslyecxi is quite disappointed when Rouza survives that charge.
• We Need a Distraction: In Calgon Business, Beagle and his Independent force decide to try and steal the ammo truck from right under the Russians' noses. The distraction, in this case, is for Beagle himself to negotiate with the Russians about the sale of the hostages for the price of that very same truck.
• Who's Laughing Now?: Giggles the Carjacker, that's who.
• You Are in Command Now: ShackTac follows U.S. Military doctrine for taking command when officers go down.^note The progression is 1) Company Commander to XO; 2) XO to Platoon Leader, starting with 1PLT; 3) Platoon Leader to Platoon Sergeant; 4) Platoon Sergeant to Squad Leader, starting with ASL; 5) Squad Leader to Fireteam Leader, starting with 1FTL; 6) Fireteam Leader to the next person in the fireteam, and so on. This occurs in most missions, at least to some extent. Of course, with near-total wipeouts of an entire platoon or company being not uncommon, low-ranking soldiers do sometimes get a chance to command the survivors - though there usually aren't many by that point.
• You Have Failed Me: Very, very rare, but in some cases Dslyecxi has punished members who have Friendly Fired on teammates, mostly if said teammates were assigned to be group leaders and officers for that mission.
  • One prominent example comes near the end of Foymer's Barn, after Madcows accidentally shoots team leader Tatertot. When Madcows can't give an explanation that satisfies Dslyecxi, Dslyecxi responds by ordering Madcows to look at Tatertot and not look away. After giving Madcows just enough time to let him think that maybe Dslyecxi isn't going to punish him after all, Dslyecxi shoots Madcows in the back of the head and later Mr. H blames it on an enemy sniper in the nearby woods... despite the fact that Shack Tac, as mentioned many time on this page, doesn't incorporate snipers or scopes on guns in their ARMA sessions.
  • In FAC Tanoa, when everyone believes that Chris(CHA) accidentally killed Morgan (the Platoon Leader for that mission), Dslyecxi tells Chris to "Stay behind, distract the enemy for us" — which everyone there knows is obviously a Suicide Mission. Then, to add onto things, Dslyecxi privately tells Taconic "If Chris makes it to the LZ, he's getting left behind."