War MMO players battle against impossible odds for 48 real hours, build a religion around a corpse pile, then crash the server
Foxhole is a sandbox-style war MMO and, while it officially released last year, it's been available in early access since 2017. Its schtick is one persistent and gigantic war game where thousands of players simultaneously battle for one of two factions, both seeking domination over a gigantic map, but with the twist that, as in a real conflict, the logistics, resource and supply side of the armies is just as important, if not more so, than the soldiers firing guns and piloting vehicles.
PCG's own Morgan Park will tell you that Foxhole is an RPG «in the literal roleplaying sense, not in the stat grinding sense» and that «like the best social games, great stories happen as a matter of course.» This past weekend saw one such story: a 48-hour long battle between an isolated island called Silver, cut-off from all logistics support and supplies, facing down an overwhelming and endless invasion force.
What happened next was so extreme and remarkable, even by MMO standards, it has instantly birthed two new rallying cries for players of the game: «praise the pile», referring to a mass of corpses that both became essential and revered, and the more self-explanatory «Silver stands!»
To set the stage: Foxhole's two factions are called the Colonials and the Wardens, and in this case the Colonials held Silver island, part of a larger area called The Oarbreakers Isles. The Wardens held the territory around Silver island, including four much larger islands, and controlled the waters to boot. This meant that not only were the Colonials on Silver island screwed, but double-screwed: They were facing far superior numbers from an army that could constantly resupply itself, while being cut off from their own supply lines and limited to
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