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)