[Zipknob]

Well unless you're tracking down a lame sniper in a small arena he will do two things. First, only expose himself from cover enough to shoot one target (peeking out like in every shooter), and then retreat to make sure nobody gets close or to put his teammates between you and him.

Also I should point out that sniper weapons arent useless at close range either... at least not in most games. Running backwards and taking pot shots while you are chased around corners is always a good way to retreat. For snipers to be useful, they cant be too heavily outdamaged by other weapons anyhow, and rate of fire makes no difference when you have cover.

In response to above, cover really isnt a counter since its then just a stand off; and using numbers advantage isnt really a solution either. I would say stealth seems very good; is stealth undetectable? In this case one man could pretty much dislodge a front lines sniper with near 100% success. (assuming he doesnt get his wimpy lightly armored head blown off too quickly)

Taking a sniper head on, I'll admit, works well if they are overconfident. Snipers who fight in the open to get off multiple shots end up taking tons of damage themselves (i'm guilty of this as well :o) and they have low hp.

To add something to the discussion, here are my observations on sniper accuracy from UT2k4, which has very few long range encounters (except in onslaught, which has no skilled players anyhow). Not that range effects accuracy anyway.
I am one of the best snipers around outside of a few Pro's, and i hit 40-45% of my shots, and 20-25% of these are headshots.
The typical competetive player, who hasnt focused on learning snipering gets at least 35% accuracy on average, with only around 10% headshots.
(stats recorded through UTcomp mutator)

Anybody have stats for other games to compare?