Sniping as a Guerrilla Warrior...

I first found ArmA while on an intensive search for a game to replace Joint Operations, which for me was the best sniping available online. I enjoyed piloting, artillery, and other roles, but sniping was the reason I played anything online at all. Competitive targeting on the local 600 meter course had gotten expensive ($2.00/round avg. x 4 hours of shooting), so a good online sniping game was just the thing I needed…

In games like Joint Ops, I’d log on, find a good good crowded map, and play in a style that made me happy. In joint Ops, a sniper has a ghillie suit and a few options for concealment. A few of us who sniped would leave the map if killed, to more accurately simulate the weight of death. The knowledge that I must leave if killed made the game more realistic and challenging, and focused me on improving strategy. A perfect score for me in a hour of playing in a crowded map was 10 Kills; 0 deaths. Perfection was rare, but it happened occasionally. Over the years, Joint Ops became a bit boring. No modder community and few maps eventually killed it for me. Also, there were ballistics simplicities that made the game almost suck for a marksman. After reading reviews and comments, I bought BF2, COD4 and ArmA in search of some real ballistics. I hated the first two games for sniping, but ArmA had some potential.

For months I learned the basics about the game, and learned how to find PvP maps that would result in good sniping opportunities. ArmA was going to be harder than Joint Ops, because with a lack of a ghillie suit or field craft, a shooter in ArmA is really more of a designated marksman. For months I resumed playing my old style of finding the people, shooting the people, and leaving if killed by the people. A perfect score for me after an hour of playing ArmA was 3 kills: 0 deaths. Compared to a real day in the life of a sniper, that’s not bad at all. I quickly learned that this type of play is very frowned upon in the ArmA community.

“Houdenie Y U kill only 2 guy? You sit out ther kill 2 guy! Cap flag! U SUK!!!!11!!eleven!!!” I read this on the bottom of my screen more than once, especially if I tried to warn my teammates of approaching armor. It turns out that a lot of public ArmA players take CQB much more seriously than the Joint Ops folks I was used to playing with, and tend to not care for snipers or intel as much.  I just kept my head down and focused on improving my marksmanship and strategy, hoping that eventually I would figure out how to get to the 10 Kills: 0 deaths ability over time. I completely ignored the flag score and focused only on personal improvement. Then I met a group of folks who changed the way I play.

“Good shot Houdini. Now I’m coming for ya.” I thought ‘who the hell is Sgt. Cowboy and why is bothering me?’ BANG! * **Houdini was killed by Sgt.Cowboy*** Before I could log off (following my personal rules of growth), “Houdini, you got TS?” I almost didn’t even respond. I wasn’t there to socialize. “You mean Teamspeak? I’ve never used it before.” “Well, Houdini, go get it and log in. I want to talk to you.”

After Sgt. Cowboy patiently walked me through the TS thing, a whole new world of play appeared before me. People were communicating and working as a team to capture a flag and hold it, ignoring personal deaths and kill ratios. I discovered that a sniper who learned to be a guerrilla fighter could do serious damage to an opposing force, and be a real contribution to a team without getting yelled at in broken English. If I wanted to learn more, all I had to do was listen… and change my reasons for being involved in the game.

For Sgt. Cowboy, sniping was the same as guerrilla fighting (sans the CQB). His opinion of what sniping was made my sniping strategy (while more realistic) look noob-ish and dull. Sure, his tactics would involve dying, but they also resulted in many more kills than the tactics of the sniper who plays to survive. In addition, his strategies were designed to hurt the entire opposing team, not just individuals. Blowing bridges, setting up ambushes, running full speed to get a rocket off at a landing chopper, searching every corner of the map for the enemy… The guerrilla warrior is usually far more valuable to an organized group than a lone sniper 700 meters away in a bush.

Today, I’m still learning to develop into an effective guerrilla style fighter, and every now and then I have the instinct to explore the extremely distant hills in search of a few perfect views of opposing flags. On occasion those more authentic tactics can be helpful to the team, but it’s rather rare. When it comes down to winning the game, I see time and time again that the team has to work as a whole, communicating and going into places that will get them killed.

My lesson in all of this is that dying isn’t everything, and there is another playing style out there that (while not authentic to a classic sniper) can be even more fun (and WAY more helpful to a team) than the Orthodox sniping strategies used in real life. Because Sgt.Cowboy’s style does involve distance shooting and attention to concealment, I like to call it “Guerrilla Sniping”... NEVER to be mistaken for classic sniping.

(By the way, if you are a classic sniper and you happen to hit Sgt. Cowboy, I have a cookie for you.)