very good survivability on medic and super good scout too
will definitely frag hard on a top im team, aquire him

for the most part i agree with what you're saying and its good to see evidence that there is more diversity in the map pool as a result, but the one thing I disagree with is the reasoning to include reckoner
in theory, it makes sense to have the most played pug site test out this new map and give it an actual player base to playtest it, but in practice the only results are people getting angry and talking with each other in mumble about how bad x y and z about the map are and how it should never be played in pugs
if after every reckoner pug the map creator was in a mumble channel and they talked about what they liked/disliked about it that would be a way to get actual feedback, or if players weren't too lazy to post on the thread with their thoughts, i think they would be much better results
a few points I've heard people make are that the map overall is way too big, the area between second and last is way too claustrophobic/cluttered with shit, one of the flank areas is impossible to push from mid into second from because it's super easy to spam from the shack on second point, the cap on the middle point is designed such that people capping are way too disadvantaged in a way that is unlike any other good cp map (think gullywash, metalworks, badlands mids--you have highground when capping, the only maps where you have a slight disadvantage capping are ultiduo maps and granary and process to an extent, but on reckoner it's such lowground that it's literally not worth going to during the midfight in any situation other than trying to go unseen and flank)

to address aiera's point, there have been a bunch of situations where invite or other higher level players are trying to captain but don't get to which results in one team having a huge disadvantage because their captain is at a lower level than the majority of the players in the pug(ex: what mr bacon used to do in invite pugs)
one easy way to address this would be to make a hierarchy with the current invite players (people who actually played matches this season or in the past, not people roster riding like skeez) being prioritized over other players

however, this could result in problems if, for example, b4nny added captain to pugs with only open players and was guarenteed a captain slot, and pretty much instantly won the pug because he was the best player added
given that situation of one player better than all others is problematic even with the current system, but it could be exacerbated if there are only a few (maybe 2-3) very good players and the invite player who gets the captain automatically gets them self and therefore has an advantage, whereas if it were two players of the same skill level captaining nobody would have the advantage

i think there is actually some truth to this, for example pugs on badlands are generally a shit show because back caps are so much easier due to lack of coordination
in some situations teams are coordinated enough for badlands pugs to actually be pretty fun but i do agree with the point that in some scenarios certain maps just don't lend themselves to enjoyable pugs for anyone

kurt hype!

oh i forgot the classic "THEIR WHOLE TEAM'S FLANK" or "THEY'RE ALL IN CHOKE" when in reality it's no more than a medic and a few other players

dont be a bitchboi
born a shitposter die a shitposter

goodnight sweet prince

that's a big if

me every time i die to a trap after my teammates walk through it and don't clear it
some stupid shit i say: "yo get in were fucking farming them"
"this uber is a non-juicer"
"this is an aids uber"
"stop feeding these cancer patients"
"yo we have full ad this is going to be a fatty uber"
"im clowning on them"
"I'm dead... wait nvm they missed me rofll"
"there's 2 soldier bots pushing big door"
"just pull the old switcheroo and take their side"

chiz likes to say "let's do the meme mid" or "we're browsing them"
connor says the phrase "tbh fam" every other sentence
wrech likes to say "did you say FEED????"

the developer snapshot of mumble (1.3.1) has this as it's default skin
it also has a lot of nice features like the ability to locally adjust people's volumes (as an alternative to locally muting them)

cANdLeStROcK

he revolutionized the "shitty 12 y/o roamer main captaining to avoid getting fatkidded in pugs" strat (which has since been adopted by the likes of neon charmander and mr bacon)

of all the shitty roamers and 12 y/o team captains I've played with (and gotten mutinied) he's probably the least retarded, but that doesn't mean much

last i played with him he either didn't pay attention and fed or decided to take add meds in order to focus more on the game, which resulted in him being super hyper and then not comming

edit: this being said he isn't bad at the game and given the state of open (cloudmaker playing roamer in grand finals???) he could probably do well on a highish open team

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)

muma to bait

i hear this guy got away with that pretty well

sandbaggers to win again

definitely depends on how much money you want to spend and what games you want to play
tf2 is mostly cpu bottlenecked but a quad i5 should do fine and unless you have tons of money to throw away i see no real point in buying a new cpu