Playing medic in pugs isn’t really that fun (at least for me) unless you can get a team of your friends/people you enjoy playing with. In discord pugs this was less of an issue because you got to choose your team after volunteering as medic, but in RGL pugs you’re really at the whims of the guys who captain. You could just end up playing with a lot of players you don’t like playing with. Medic also has the problem of being way more fun in scrims than in pugs, imho.

when god made us he gave us free will, and with that free will we choose not to play medic in pugs

I have no idea how anyone enjoys playing medic at all, even less so in pugs

Lower divs are having this problem in the season RN too, there's barely any AM or IM meds to go around.

Because in RGL PUGs you can volunteer medic and still get fatkidded constantly with less choice on who you get to play with.

imo med is actually p fun but if you play a pug with certain people, it becomes the most annoying experience in tf2

Being a med main is like being a chainsaw man devil hunter; you have to be a bit fucked in the head to actually main the class.

turns out the class with the least control over the game and the most pressure on their shoulders isn't very fun to play when half the people you are playing with are trolling and playing for clips! wow!!

Agreed! We need more people to take a bullet and play medic! Not me of course, I would never play medic, but all you other people need to stop playing the classes you enjoy and play medic for me-i mean the good of the pug system.

be the change u want 2 see in the world….

I will.

IMO the current rgl pug system takes a lot of the character / community feel from pugs, a lot of the fun for me was hanging with everyone in the mumble channel after and when the next one is being picked, but that shouldn’t be hard to fix if RGL wants to (I posted on the thread)

Captaining yourself lets you play with people you like, but the elo system might discourage people from wanting to do that bc it risks them losing elo / people getting mad at them for picking bad teams. I’ve played a few games and I definitely preferred the atmosphere of previous pug systems (e.g., seeing someone’s win loss on a given class when you hover over them kind of feels weird to me, if this was a faceit ladder with prizes I can see it but for example I went 0-4 on soldier pugs and someone pointed it out and it made me not rly want to add again lol). Maybe I’m the minority in disliking elo and these more competitive features but they definitely do add more pressure to a class that is already stressful enough.

But I think the larger issue is just a general trend of medics getting burned out / not seeing any strong reason to keep competing at the top level, most of the old heads like myself have quit or decided to offclass or play at LANs only. If yall want people to play medic more the first thing you should do is be less hard on newer players (like referring to them as 1300 elo lol)

pretty much this. if it's a serious pug, medic is better. but there is no incentive to try anymore. doesn't help when people only add to their offclass; refusing to play their main. or a pug having 24/7 sniper on other team

you do have control over the game btw. just unbind mouse2

try milking an uber through a choke with a mute pocket scout who will only say "i didn't say to use" after you've been forced to a bomb that went uncalled

Walrex thats u on combo scout

https://imgur.com/BEVM3GJ.png

my eternal op

I disagree with the sentiment that medic has no impact. If you are unhappy with the way a player is playing, you have the power to ensure that you have a far greater negative impact on their enjoyment of the game than they have on yours. True power is dropping a player you don't like and then pretending to be upset with yourself that you did so. The best part? They'll never know. This is a form of accelerationism that I am convinced some pug medics have been honing for years.

https://i.imgur.com/jNC1u74.png

i haven't pugged in a while. so maybe everyone nowadays just doesn't try/main class anymore. when pugchamp existed, u could get some good pugs with people actually trying to win. medic is fun in those type of pugs

most of the people that willingly add up to medic (myself included) are people who dont even actually want to play medic, but wouldn't get to play a pug on the website ever otherwise since the same handful of people just play every pug. thus you get lower quality medics (again myself included lol) and often people get annoyed or mad having to play with lower quality medics and then make the pug less fun for the medic player and encourages them not to readd because they'd have to deal with that player or just that general unfun vibe in the pug again

OR sometimes the added medics are established players but still also dont main medic, and they only add up so that the pug will even start and thus their heart isn't in it and just has to entertain themselves or check out and play on autopilot

medic itself, id also wager to guess for most people who browse the competitive TF2 forum, is just not fun to play in 6s. you are a walking ult timer with little to no say on what actually happens in the game and you don't do anything but follow people around. at least overwatch drip feeds mini dopamine hits with abilities like ana nade/sleep and all the other shit that supports get to do besides heal. shooting arrows is fun but then your team will just get mad at you (understandably if you're trying to win tbh) for arrowing too much so you just have to be walking fleshlight all game

Treatment in pugs, declining player base, and many other factors have lead to this.

I blame b4nny

I blame rgl

It can suck going into a pug and getting yelled at like it's Grand Finals. It can get exhausting.

weve come full circle in the tf2 pug loop

next step is "we have no medics so lets make our own puggroup and roll meds" aka back to pughub

:DDDDDDDDDDDDD

Why would I play a class that relies on the rest of my team not being retarded to have fun on? In pugs of all places too…

the solution is not being nicer or taking more responsibility for ur medic's survival, it is coding a bot that can play medic well

In general because of scarcity I'm likely playing med for people who have way more experience and play at a higher level than me and making mistakes is a part of the learning process. It's more that if I feel like I'm not going to be respected by the people on the pug or treated like a nonhuman that I'm not really going to be inclined to add, and allot of times it can be little things.

Examples:
If I add vs an invite medic and the invite medic gets picked hella early, it just makes me feel like my team isn't going to want me there because I'm so much worse than the other person and it will be my fault that we lose

Going into a pug making a mistake and Instead of being told something on how to adjust my gameplay by a well adjusted human I get a neet who's sighs audibly into his mic, rages, or stops talking altogether and gives up after one mistake.

Getting called shit on stream during the pug, like I'm not gonna hear about it right after. Why would I feel like playing with you if you do this.

People who troll, throw, but then get mad over any time a medic makes mistakes.

People who pick the friend team + the medic but then don't actually include the medic in their memes, so it's like you are left out of the pug experience.

Idk pretty much every medic I know has their blacklist of players and if that person is added and likely to be picked it significantly decreased the likelihood I add.

If the pug has Della, I'm not your fella.

There are some people that I've come to recognize who aren't worth 30+ minutes of self-flagellation in order to tenuously tolerate them as a medic playing on the same pug team; I'm not particularly interested in finding out who else is just as unconstructive and mentally taxing to play with in the year 2024.