There technically aren't any snipers in Bad Company 2. There are just players with sniper rifles who are considered recon class. "Recon" is a verb that, surprisingly, doesn't mean "park somewhere off the beaten path and rack up as many kills as you can with no regard for actually trying to win the round or even doing anything to help the other players in your squad".

Yet Bad Company 2 is full of people who don't know that. So I've started playing a new class: the sniper cop.

After the jump, read about how you, too, can be a sniper cop.

You remember that level in Call of Duty 2 where you're storming Stalingrad and there's a kommisar kind of dude with a megaphone berating you as you approach the city? I tried that approach, but minus stuff about the motherland and the glory of Stalin. Unfortunately, my nasally voice coming over Xbox Live saying things like, "Hey, you guys, you really should try to take the objective" and "Uh, can we get a little help over here?" didn't have the same effect as a burly Russian with a big mustache and a megaphone.

So I turned to more persuasive measures. I turned to the essential tool of the Bad Company 2 sniper cop: the tracer dart pistol. Did you know the tracer dart can stick to friendly targets? It sits there and glows. For instance, if you affix it to someone's head - say, someone with a sniper rifle crouching just behind a ridge or in some foliage - that person's head will be super easy to spot from a long way off by other players with sniper rifles. Furthermore, if you attach it to someone's face, it will shine a red glow into his line of site and maybe even obscure his vision. It's like a fantastic glowing clown nose, or the schnozz of a certain reindeer who saved Christmas. And the beauty of a friendly tracer dart is that there's no way to remove it short of dying.

So whenever I spawn, especially when attacking in Rush mode which relies largely on my team moving forward to capture objectives, I made a habit to visit those yahoos hanging back to snipe and pad their kill count instead of helping us win the round. I carefully line up the tracking pistol and fire a bright red beacon straight into their unhelpful faces.

I picked this trick up from someone else (thanks to Sniper Cop Chief of Police FlyinJ!) and I wasn't sure it was actually working until I used it repeatedly on a guy in my squad. He was hanging back while the rest of us were actually playing the game. Every time I passed him, I made sure to plant a tracer dart on his face, which was easy to do, because his face was very still and shoved against the scope of his rifle.

After I did this a few time, I got an alert that he'd sent me a message over Xbox Live. It consisted of a brief metaphor in which I was equated with a portion of the male anatomy. As I continued gifting him with tracer darts, he sent me a second message in which he used an uncouth three-letter word to imply that I had a sexual predilection for other men.

But more importantly, he started joining us as we stormed the objectives. Was it because of me? Who knows. Who cares! He stopped sniping and I stopped shooting him in the face with tracer darts. So next time you get frustrated with all the sniper's in Bad Company 2, take up your tracer dart pistol, join the force, and brace yourself for a couple of potentially abusive comments. Griefing for the greater good is a thankless job, but somebody's gotta do it.

(Superthanks to FlyinJ for coming up with this great idea!)