Aiming

Now what you have all been waiting for, how to shoot people in the head. Before you start you want to make sure you have a good hardware setup that is comfortable and allows you to aim precisely.You want to start with the basics, learning how to quickscope. Quickscoping is scoping in near someones head and quickly moving your crosshair onto their head and clicking. You want to scope in as close as possible to their head so you only have to make small adjustments that are quicker and easier. Depending on who you are shooting you want to aim differently. If it is long distance or against a sniper that is scoped in and it only requires minute movement of your crosshair you want to use your strafe keys to aim onto their head. Even if you arent using your strafe keys to aim you still want to be strafing constantlyto be dodging enemy snipers.Hardscoping is when you scope in and remain scoped in to charge up a headshot. Hardscoping is useful for high-health targets and when you are waiting for a target to become visible. For hardscoping you want to keep yourself protected because you have a very narrow field of view and move slowly. When hardscoping you may want to hide behind cover and peek out once you are charged up. This strategy works well against heavies that are shooting at you. Hardscoping works best at long range because it is difficult to make large adjustments needed for close range headshots while scoped in.You can find sniper servers to practice quickscoping by typing "sniper" into the map filter.On sniper servers it will be quite flat so you only have to worry about aiming left-to-right. Since it is only snipers they will be moving slowly when they are scoped in making them easier to hit making it a good place to start. You always want to be moving around, using the default sniper rifle, and trying to headshot as quickly as possible; the longer you are scoped in the easier you are for the enemy to hit. Once you do sniper servers for a couple of hours you can rack up hundreds of kills and learn the basics of quickscoping. Although enemy snipers are relatively easy to headshot so once you know how to quickscope you want ot move onto someting else.MGE is a 1v1 mod that lets you and one of your friends or a random to play on a small map to 20 points. Usually this is used to focus on aim and skills that transfer to competitive. For sniper this can be great practice for playing against good snipers, and on uneven terrain. You can try quickscoping , or hardscoping other snipers or even other classes. You will die alot but what is important is that you are getting betterFor mge servers type "mge" in the server filter.After you kill someone in MGE their character will let out a scream or say a line. WIth headphones on you can use this to locate them immediately after you kill them so you dont get flanked. Very useful, if you dont know where the enemy is you are at a disadvantage.What you want to do next it play on maps such as nucleus and harvest that are flat and have good sniper sightlines. Here you need to combine your knowledge of positioning with quickscoping. Quicksoping enemies that are jumping and not snipers is much harder so it requires a lot of practice.Do a lot of this.From there you can keep practicing headshotting on various maps and situations and even try competitive sniping in tf2center.com or wherever.Another factor in aiming is lag compensation. TF2 has a strange lag compensation system that i wont get into, but you can get away with aiming behind someone and pulling off a headshot. Playing a lot will make you used to lag compensation and how it works.