You Are Not a Sniper

I've been playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 now for about a week and I have one huge pet peeve about the game that I had to blog about it. Everyone and their little brother loves using the Recon class to be a sniper. In almost every game, most of my squad will be working together to complete objectives like capturing a flag, blowing up a M-COM station, leveling a building, or taking out enemy vehicles. Each of these tasks helps the team win. However, there is always at least one guy in the squad who's off hiding in the woods trying to be that sniper in Enemy At The Gate. Hey, guy! You are not a sniper!

There are four classes in the game, each with their individual strengths and weaknesses. The Assault class is useful for taking out enemy infantry and basically owning other people. He can support his teammates with ammo packs. A skilled Assault soldier can kill enemy infantry from both close and long distances. He can keep providing extra ammo for the other classes to continue blowing things up.

The Engineer class is great for repairing vehicles and for blowing up enemy ones. Engineers have problems in long range combat but are great at close range. Engineers can keep ally vehicles around longer by repairing them with his drill thingy.

The Medic class is great for providing suppressing fire, resurrecting fallen teammates, and for dropping health packs. The light machine gun is also great a taking out infantry when fired in short bursts. He can use his defibrillator paddles and bring back teammates that have died. Each "res" also restores tickets that are normally lost with each death.

Last and certainly least, we have the Recon class. The class is meant to sneak around in the front lines to spot enemy troops and to blow up objectives. They have a motion detector ball that they can toss nearby which reveals enemy locations. The Recon class can also blow up objectives and vehicles with their remote detonated C4. Lastly, the Recon class can use a variety of weapons ranging from sub-machine guns to shotguns to sniper rifles. However, everyone seems to forget that last fact and always try to snipe. Why? Sniping is so cool. It looks cool in movies. It looks cool in video games. It feels awesome when you are a one-man army who can strike fear in your enemies and make them paranoid to venture out in the open. Unfortunately, most people stink at it and can't shoot fish in a barrel.

Bad Company 2 is a team-based game. It's hard to win without working as a team. You can be the best person on the server and you will still lose consistently if the rest of your teammates aren't working together. All of the other classes fill some sort of rule that helps the entire team. But on every team, there are at least a half-dozen people trying to snipe. They only care about having a good K/D (kill/death) ratio. They think that as long as they kill more people than the number of times they die, they are helping their team win. They just run off on their own, hide somewhere, and wait for unsuspecting victims to run in front of their cross-hairs. A 2:1 K/D looks good on paper. But if you only kill 4 people in a round and your team still loses by 50 tickets, it doesn't mean anything! If you hid in the woods and let the enemy tank roll by and mow down 10 of your teammates, what good does that do?

Argh, snipers are so useless in this game! The main problem is that you just can't kill enemies fast enough. The sniper rifle usually takes two shots to kill someone. By the time you fire the first round, the enemies will have an idea where you're hiding. If there are multiple enemies together (which usually happens because the other team will be working together), you will get run over. Sure, you can hide and pick your spots and get the stragglers. But you can't cover your teammates' backs if you're always trying to preserve your own life.

The team is better off if you switched to a real class and did something useful. Anything! If you are an assault class, you can at least kill more enemies and at a much faster rate. If you are an engineer, you can blow up their tanks which keeps them from killing more of your teammates. Medics can bring your teammates back to life.

It is called the RECON class for a reason! It is not the Sniper class! Just because you have a slick ghillie suit, a pair of binoculars, and a buff rifle, that does not mean that you are a sniper! Stop wasting tickets and help your team. For the last time, you n00b; You are a not a sniper!