How do you know if you’ve had a successful day as an airsoft sniper? For most airsoft players, they look at whether they managed to capture the flag, save the hostage, locate the bomb, or avoid the zombies. It might be that you managed to fly head-first through a window in front of everyone, got enough footage to fill your week in with editing, or turned heads by wearing a silly outfit.

For the sniper, it’s a little different. We support the team in achieving objectives rather than chasing them ourselves. We don’t go to make a scene or have everyone notice us. Our role, usually, is just to run wild and free and cause havoc. At a recent event, I attended as an observer to a sniper team to assist and assess their play, and afterwards I was chatting to one of the guys about the day and he felt he hadn’t achieved much, and at times wasn’t sure what he was even supposed to be doing in the field, which is a common issue when you have no defined role, or goals, or objectives. Just floating freely around site being a nuisance.

The only real indicator we have of our overall performance is our tally each day of how many kills we got, and how many times we messed up and died. The K/D ratio. High kills + low deaths is the ideal, and as a sniper we’re not going to be doing any technical jobs or roles such as medic or vehicle driver; it’s just about killing the enemy and staying alive, and the better we get at those two metrics the better we are overall as a sniper.

This is how I measure a day :

• More kills than deaths. A good day at the office, you’ve contributed well by doing more damage to the enemy team than they have to you. If this ratio is 5:1, you’ve killed five of theirs for every time they’ve taken you out. Doesn’t mean the team won overall, but you’ve done your bit.

• More deaths than kills. You’ve given the enemy team more score than they should have. Could be a combination of things but it’s important to go back after the game and make some notes about what went wrong, and why it went wrong, so you can fix it for next time. Rifle issues, bad positions, poor decision making. Be honest, otherwise you’ll keep having a shit time. And normally that results in yet another AEG user bleating about “don’t play as a sniper, you probably won’t enjoy it” on YouTube that I have to skip to get back to my music.

• Equal numbers. Now, this isn’t necessarily a negative. Yeah you turned up and played, maybe could have had some more kills but you didn’t cost your team in terms of deaths. You’ve turned up and although it wasn’t a positive for your team, it wasn’t a negative at least and you probably learned a lot in the process. Even if you do a game day and score ZERO kills, look at it and think “yeah, I didn’t do any physical damage but I managed to stay alive and they couldn’t find or hit me”, and the zero deaths then is great because you’re mastering the art of staying alive, and that’s the harder part. If your rifle is at least half decent then putting crosshairs on and pulling the trigger is definitely the easier thing to learn.

A lot of players, both sniper and AEG users (I know that’s a broad term and I keep using it but it just covers most of the rest of the field) seem hell bent on scoring as many kills as possible, but that’s not as important. For example, I can play a game as a sniper and score 10:1. I’ll take ten guys out and die only once, which isn’t a bad return. Some AEG player can come up and boast about getting 50 kills but in throwing himself into the action to get them, carelessly, could finish with 60 deaths. He’s given the opposing team 10 more kills than if he just stayed at home, whereas my score has been a positive because I’ve inflicted more than I’ve received.

Of course, kills alone don’t win games. It is (usually) a team effort to achieve an objective and your role as the sniper is to help the cause. It might be that you take cover watching over a key area of the field and shoot enemy players trying to cross it enough that they can’t use that part of the site, which might be an important route to the objective – denial of area, which gives your team an advantage, no matter how slight. It could be a game where a team has to transport an object and you hunt down the players carrying it and shoot them to slow them down and buy some extra time for your team.

Either way, if you’re a stealthy sniper, nobody will really know what you did anyway so it’s up to you to be honest with yourself and judge your own performance on the day. Having a bad day is more useful in the long term to work out what you need to change.