Haha, don't worry, this is a serious thread. I just made that the title to make this an idiot-free zone inhabited by people with only the most exquisite and refined of tastes.
I’ve been playing Team Fortress 2 competitively on and off for about 6 years now and have seen more than my fair share of internet debates about how to improve both the gameplay and community aspects of Team Fortress 2. These discussions tend to revolve around the ideas of making the gamer faster, easier to watch, increasing class usage rates, and making the game more accessible to new players. Those are clearly all crucial conversations to have, but I believe that the competitive TF2 community hasn’t paid enough attention to a certain issue. I know quite a few people who enjoy it, at least 13 of them if they’re in a good mood and even I occasionally enjoy it myself, but that is not enough. The biggest problem Team Fortress 2 has as both a competitive and public game is that there just aren’t enough people who want to play medic.
Everyone knows that medic isn’t the most popular class, but I don’t think enough time has been spent thinking about deep of an impact this has on the game. The competitive community has always been desperate for new players and a big part of why it is so hard to attract them is because pubs aren’t enjoyable enough to a lot of people who may have ended up loving competitive TF2 if only they stuck around long enough to discover it. Making medic a more popular class to play in pubs would make pub teams more balanced, which would lead to a more competitive and serious pub environment. As competitive players, we all know how quickly the game turns to shit when the medic leaves and how hard it can be get back to playing seriously after you’ve waited 17 minutes for a medic to join, who will most likely just start screwing around himself because that’s what everyone else is doing. It is really silly to blame public players for goofing around when we all do the same thing as soon as one team has a medic and the other doesn’t. It may be too late now, but I think that our best chance at attracting the still significant pub playerbase is to do whatever we can to convince Valve to improve the overall experience people have playing pubs. Not only will this lead to more pubbers finding us, but it will also lead to more competitive players spending their spare time playing pubs, which will make us a more cohesive community as a whole.
From the perspective of our side of the community, the most noticeable change that will occur as a result of making medic more fun to play will be pugs and lobbies starting more often. Reducing the wait time to play a pug or lobby will improve the community by not only making the game’s community feel more alive even if it hasn’t actually grown in population, but by making each PUG people play feel less valuable in terms of time. Its undoubtedly true there will always be people getting upset at new players, but a big part of why people get upset is that they often have to wait 30 minutes to play a game that's either over in 5 minutes or dragged out until the time runs out because they got stuck with someone who doesn’t even know the basics of 6v6. People commonly choose to play medic when they’re trying to play competitively for the first time and it is unfortunate that the class we need more of is the most likely to be discouraged from playing the game competitively. Ideally, Valve would deal with this issue by adding an effective training mode and making the public game more like ours, but I don’t think either of those are ever going to happen. At least we know they at least say they are willing to make significant class changes, such as the upcoming heavy and pyro reworks.
Many public players like the main idea of 6v6, but don’t want to participate because they are unable to play their main class for a significant amount of time for it to be worthwhile to them. The most commonly proposed solutions to this issue is to change the 6v6 format so that utility classes will be more prevalent in the meta and to educate the pub community about why the 6v6 format is the the way it is. What seems to draw people to classes like pyro, heavy, and engineer, the one’s who seem to dislike 6v6 the most, is pretty similar to what draws people to playing medic. All of these classes are heavily reliant on proper positioning, don’t require much DM skill to play effectively, and they could all be considered support or defensive classes depending on your point of view and the current situation. Instead of trying to convince people that what we like is more fun than what they like or taking a huge risk by changing our format to be more inclusive of people, we should do what we can to change the class that is already the centerpiece of the meta in a way that will make it more attractive people who already main a support class.
The number of teams during a season is always limited by how many people are willing to play medic and there's a reason why I wrote "willing" and not "want to". There are currently too many people playing medic not because they enjoy it, but because they just want their team to live. Having people play a class they don't really want to for about 8 hours a week during the season isn't healthy for the community and I’m positive it has lead to the death of many teams.
I’ve written a lot about how I believe the medic’s lack of popularity affects the game, so I guess it’s about time for me to say what exactly I mean by making medic more fun to play. Before I get to that though, there are some things about medic that should not be changed. The class must not have its offensive capabilities any more than slightly improved, it should stay a gamesense rather than DM oriented class, and it should always be possible to estimate how much uber the enemy medic could potentially have as long as you’re paying attention and communicating.
As a medic you do have some impact about how your team plays by choosing when to pop uber, who you heal, and how aggressive or passively you play, but I think that those decisions you make as a medic are a little too easily thrown off by how your teammates choose to play. Part of what makes the other main classes so fun is being able to add your own personal style to how you play them and medic has the least room for that because of how often you are just reacting to the actions of your teammates. Essentially, the general mindset should change from going to your medic to get heals, to the medic coming to you. This is a tricky thing to pull off though. Increasing the medic’s movement speed or giving him some sort advanced mobility so that he can move between teammates more quickly could easily make him much too difficult to kill. My proposition is to increase the medic’s movement speed so that he is always moving as fast as a scout, change his base health to 125, give him the ability to double jump, and replace his medigun with the scattergun. Thank you for reading this.