incoming rant
why the FUCK does this site randomly ban 6 out of the 9 maps right off the bat?
i feel like this is a bug but if it's not it definitely needs to be rethought
i think i can speak for everyone in saying that when rng leaves you with a choice between pugging reckoner, metalworks or granary you know it's going to be shit
if it were up to me I would either ban a minimal number of maps randomly (maybe 2-3) and allow captains to narrow it down further, or add back the ability to rock the vote
rtv worked perfectly fine in literally every other pug service that has been used in the past (most notably pugme, tf2pug.na and tf2mix) because people actually do not want to play the same map over and over again
as dingo once pointed out, it's astounding how people figure out how to make each subsequent 'new pug site' worse than all of its predecessors
the reason pugna's irc bot was good was not because it had aesthetically appealing visuals or that it had a bunch of fancy extra features, but it was simple: it did what people needed and nothing more
I feel like in terms of priorities the main thing should be people actually enjoying the pug rather than arbitrarily enforcing rules for more "diversity" which actually ends up with people banning reckoner and granary 95% of the time but being forced to play sunshine metalworks or badlands
i would be very interested to see some statistics for the overall number of pugs played on each map to see if the system actually works the way it's supposed to, but that being said I feel like the majority of people would rather be able to choose which map they play (along with which sub player they get...) than try to achieve the 'perfect' balance of diversity
i actually cant remember the last time ive played a pug on snakewater and i play way too much on this fucking site rofl
edit: actually even if the system was kept as is one possible solution to the problem could just be to allow for rtvs but only if there is, for example, a 7/12 majority players who don't want to play the map (though if it were just to be a majority if 10 people joined fast they could rtv even if the last two people don't want to change the map)