The Importance of Using Your Head
What matters most in sniping?
Some people would say marksmanship. Others might say camouflage. Neither answer is wrong. A sniper needs the skill to put a round on target, and the ability to stay hidden from the enemy.
But I believe the most important thing for a sniper is vision. Not simply seeing well — you need a high reaction speed to visual stimuli. A sniper's job is to inflict effective casualties at long range, to halt the enemy or slow them down, which means reading distant movement is what counts most.
Of course, none of that means a thing if you can't actually hit the shot. In a way, becoming a sniper demands a lot of different abilities. A game wouldn't be all that different. You might not need battlefield-level standards, but you'd still have to come close.
By that measure, the skill of the teammate holding a sniper rifle beside me was pathetic.
BANG!
The allied sniper pulled the trigger. For all the confidence with which the man squeezed it, the bullet didn't even come close to the target. He chambered another round and lined up his next shot.
Honestly, I didn't need to watch any further.
The most fatal thing that can happen to a sniper is having your position exposed. That's why the job demands such a high standard of accuracy. The phrase one shot, one kill didn't come from nowhere.
And this man with the rifle? It wasn't even a near miss. At this point I had to wonder if he'd ever intended to hit anything at all. Worse, even after the miss gave him away, he showed no intention of relocating. Could he not see the enemies closing in on his position? It was the kind of play that made you wonder what, exactly, he had inside his skull while he was gaming.
I quietly closed the spectator window. I'd been watching while I waited to respawn after dying on the move with my sniper rifle, and all I felt was disappointment. I'd assumed he'd at least have a sniper's basics down. Turns out he didn't even know the fundamentals of the fundamentals.
The thought that someone with that kind of skill had looked at me that way was just absurd. Where the hell had that useless confidence even come from?
After a short while, color bled back into my grayscale vision. My character had respawned.
Moving too carelessly last time had been the mistake. I hadn't expected anyone on the other team to loop the outskirts for a backstab. The map showed our side getting pushed across the board. The damage from that flanking player must have been pretty severe. I'd need to move fast if I wanted to close the score gap.
I'd already marked a few sniper points. First was the building at the center of the City Combat Map — the tallest structure on the field, sitting right in the middle, with a view of the whole map at a glance.
That one I had to rule out. It was the best sniping spot on the map, which meant the enemy was almost certainly watching it. More importantly, our allied sniper was already parked there. Two snipers dumping rounds from the same position — I couldn't think of a more textbook troll move.
So the point I picked was a building at the far right edge of the map. It was tucked into a corner, but it had enough height that, aside from a few blind spots, I could read the overall flow of movement. Best of all, I had a clear view of the allied sniper on the central building.
The enemy had definitely spotted him, and they would go after the sniper first. No — I couldn't even call him a sniper. A guy like that? Yeah. A shit-pooper. That was the right word.
A common slur for players who do nothing but snipe or camp from high ground or cover. It fit this user perfectly — the kind who spends an entire match crouched in one spot with a sniper rifle. The way he sat looked exactly like someone taking a dump, and all he did was wait endlessly for someone to wander into his sight picture. The nickname fit him like a glove.
I set up my rifle and looked toward the shit-pooper through the scope.
BANG!
Another gunshot cracked from his position. No kill log popped up. No surprise. He'd missed again.
This shit-pooper had been sniping from the same spot the whole time. At this point it was weirder that the enemy team was leaving him alone. I could see hostiles gathering at the entrance of the building where he was perched.
This was where I came in. I'd just left out the right bait, and the enemy had taken it without a shred of suspicion.
BANG!
A sharp report, and one of the enemies at the entrance dropped. A clean shot through the skull. He died without even a chance to resist.
Had they not expected another sniper? The remaining enemies started milling around in confusion after watching their teammate go down. They scrambled for nearby cover, but to me their movements looked painfully slow.
BANG!
Another fierce crack of the rifle. Even though the target was moving, my bullet punched clean through his temple.
This was the moment I loved most. The instant you steady your breathing and take the shot. It felt like the only things left in the world were me and the target I had to hit.
TING!
I yanked the bolt back and the spent casing flicked out. I chambered the next round and evened my breath. Couldn't exhale too hard. Even a light breath could throw off the aim.
Maybe because two of his teammates had just died in front of him, the last remaining enemy wasn't showing himself. He was tucked behind cover, waiting for a chance to run.
I let out a short breath and slowly brought my finger to the trigger. Stay calm. What a sniper needs is patience. If you're going to spray blindly, you'd be better off grabbing an SMG and rushing.
The enemy hiding behind cover. Apparently his patience wasn't that strong. After a long stretch with no incoming fire, he peeked his head out — with no idea it would be the last thing he ever did.
BANG!
The trigger I'd been squeezing passed the break point and sent the chambered round downrange.
I smiled with satisfaction at the kill log that floated up at the edge of my vision.
This. This is why you snipe.
"So, how was that, everyone?"
I tossed out an appropriate line, remembering I was live. You can't talk while you're lining up a shot, so you have to communicate in the gaps. Otherwise the viewers would jump me for running a silent stream.
I liked the viewers' reaction. What a beautiful sight. The unreadable emotes and wall-of-text spam were gone. All that remained in chat was a streamer playing the game and an audience answering in kind. The occasional shit-stirrer tried to sour the room, but those messages got buried under the rest soon enough.
A very satisfying situation — except I couldn't just sit there staring at chat. This was still a game, and it had one very clear difference from a real battlefield. The biggest one, you could say, was that the people you killed came back. In plain terms, the enemies I'd just dropped were going to respawn. And if you got killed, there was something called a killcam — a kind of highlight reel of your own death, like watching your life flash before your eyes.
Which meant the enemies I'd just killed now knew exactly where I was hiding. A sniper's position getting leaked is seriously fatal. I'd finished one successful string of shots. Time to change points.
Sitting in one spot like an anti-aircraft gun was not a good look. It wasn't like he was a Siege Tank — why keep camping the same tile? And if he was going to be that stubborn, he could at least be good at it. His sniping was awful. The weirdly stubborn players you run into are often the ones with real skill, but that rule didn't seem to apply here. Hence the nickname.
That said, it wasn't all bad. One way or another, that shit-pooper had made an excellent piece of bait. A magnificent decoy who pulled every scrap of aggro on the map. A human flashbang.
I didn't have much left to do. Strategy, tactics, the kind of elaborate scheme you draw up before a fight — that was the sort of thing you only really needed to think about on a real battlefield. A few smart plays were enough to turn a game on its head.
There was no real need to belabor the importance of using your head.