Isn't the whole point of recons to be sneaky-sneaky? That's what I got from the description of the class at chargen.
As a recon, you have three(four) jobs you can do. Two of them are useful and when done well make you a credit to the team. One(two) of them makes you a liability and marks you as a noob. Unfortunately neither of the useful jobs gets you a high player kill count so most free players don't want to use them.
Sniping is useful for the team as long as you focus on buildings. A good sniper can disrupt an engi nest before the engi can react (Or just kill him and then break the nest). If you focus on killing other players, sniping becomes less useful. Killing robots isn't much fun but with only ten people on your team if you're not contributing to the effort it's going to hurt the team.
Bombing is also useful, and lots of fun. Bomb engi nests, bomb the control point, I killed the entire enemy team once by dropping a stun bomb and poison bomb on the point. It's harder than sniping and until you're higher level you won't do as well, plus you spend a lot of time waiting for your cooldowns.
Melee is not useful. You won't do well. Even if you kick ass at it you're probably going to have 4 or 5 kills by the end of the game and the team will suffer for it.
Unfortunately, all the free players get on there and want to be Naruto so in the 10-29 PvP you'll usually have four or five recons on your team and they're all running around trying to swordfight and you've pretty much already lost. A lot of the time they don't even realize they take damage when you block them and you can just hold down the right mouse button while they kill themselves. That or they go sniper and just plink away at well-supported assaults on the point and they may as well not be doing anything.