I've found that having a good gaming mouse pad (I have a large steelseries gaming mouse pad) really helps, I actually tried using a lesser mousepad and it really did make a difference as I felt the inconsistencies. I just have a midrange wireless keyboard/mouse combo that you can see here: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/ke...s/145&cl=ca,en

Some people go crazy for the gaming mice/keyboards and say it makes a difference. I never found that it really did. As long as your comfortable with your keyboard and mouse combo and your mouse is a laser one then you're pretty much set.

Sensitivity varies, I think I have mine at like 6.0 but its influenced by other factors like the mouse itself and the windows setting. Your sensitivity should be set at something that you are comfortable with but it should allow you to do at least a 180 degree turn in one jerk of the wrist. If you set it too high you'll find yourself overshooting targets, if its too low then its going to take you forever to acquire targets. Whatever you set it to, you'll get used to it.

There's also basically two kinds of snipers out there. Theres the twitch aimers and the careful ones. If you're a twitch aimer you're basically making fast mouse movements to get the headshot (they're also commonly accused of hacking if they manage to master it) and careful is when you send an extra second or two to line up your shot. I'm a bit of both, if you do a lot of twitch aiming then you'll find yourself missing a lot more shots compared to if you spent that extra second or two. If you're aiming for a solider or heavy you want to spend the extra second to make that shot count (since it takes a few seconds to charge it up again), but if you're against another sniper then you probably want to do some more twitch aiming since when it comes down to sniper vs sniper its just a matter of who lands the headshot first most of the time.

If you're a beginner, I suggest starting out with careful aiming and working your way up. It also helps to have relatively new snipers on the other team as well, so then you can get some good practice in.

I'm much of a fulltime sniper these days (I play it about 90% of the time now), I keep improving even now but its important to keep in mind that sniper is still only a support class. Snipers are more effective on teams that are slightly more offensive/spread out, because if your team turtles up then you're most of the time clustered together making it easier for the other team to overwhelm you. As sniper I don't get more kills then effective heavies like rocks and capt. dude, I only get more score because headshots count x2, but score means little because as an effective support class, just your very presence can most of the time make the other team change tactics (like getting excessive spies/snipers to take me out which has happened fairly often, meaning less combat classes for their team which allows our team to push up), with the addition that you can take out key targets that can save your teammates from things such as immediate threats, medics, and engies.

As sniper you are at a severe disadvantage when dealing with spies, but fortunately there's a lot of stupid spies out there. Their revolver is better than your smg, but their knife is no match for your machete with the exception of backstabbing and facestabbing (most spies just keep stabbing even though you're about to murder them, but then theres spies like magna which will bring out their revolver and keep their distance, their damage output trumps yours, but not many spies actually do that). Generally there's multiple indicators that can help you against spies, it helps to wear headphones so you can hear footsteps if you're in a place where there's usually little of your teammates around, and you can also hear decloaking spies. In some situations there will be too much action and you won't hear any of this but majority of the time I've gotten spies this way.

Communicating as a sniper typically isn't a biggie. Since you'll be usually at the back you can sometimes keep your team updated with impending threats and you can sometimes see spies (either uncloaking or weird teammates hiding). I've actually found if the team communicates with me however, they can tell me what their biggest threats are, where the enemy sniper is so I can get him, if there's a spy in the area, etc. However you have to be very specific (I know that can be difficult). They've also planned out what they're going to do which means I can get into a position to cover them. I've found that a medic/heavy/sniper team can actually be really effective if done right.

The last thing is that a team only benefits from having just one sniper, sometimes even two. If you're consistently not helping the team or not keeping up with the other sniper(s) then its a good idea to change classes, sniper is too much of a situational class and teams would usually benefit instead by having another medic or combat class.