tscOn the sub issue, as I've said before:
tscWe also hope to allow captains to choose from a pool of players narrowed down from those who apply to the sub spot rather than being assigned a sub automatically.
We've been asking for this for literally like a year now, you can't just keep saying 'yeah we're hoping to fix it eventually' but then never do anything about it.
As dirtymort said, with the current state of affairs, captains are put in a really shitty spot because people can take sub spots in pugs where everyone is way better than them and ruin the game, but if as a captain you sub out a sub (because everyone agrees, rktman subbing scout in a pug full of invite players is not a good idea) you can get banned even if it is for the greater good of the pug to do so. Until this is changed, I'm going to continue instasubbing rktman whenever he slithers his way into my pug on a fragging class (sorry bub, maybe one day you'll learn...)
tscOn the topic of waiting to start a game, I do see the benefit of flexibility and allowing players to wait for a sub if one doesn't show up. However, I also don't think it's ideal for someone to be forced to wait for a long time simply because a player didn't show up and other players in the game are willing to wait for a substitute for that long.
As laz said earlier this just doesn't make any sense practically. Because there will inevitably be people who take a long time to show up or don't show at all, it makes no sense to kill the pug and force EVERYONE to wait for a redraft (not to mention the possibility of not being picked in the redraft, for example if another pug ends right at the same time, causing them to wait for yet another draft process and still have the possibility of not playing).
Also given how long it currently takes for pugs to start with servers initializing and with the bullshit 'you are not authorized to join this server' glitches, 5 minutes to join is definitely too short. If y'all can get your shit together and make everything much smoother it would be fine (e.g, in freakpugs the info comes up almost instantly with no issue), but as is the timer should probably be more like 10 minutes.
Just make sure to allow the people in the pug to actually choose weather or not they want it to be killed, because as surprising as this may seem to a fascist who literally doesn't play the game ever not to mention pugs, some people enjoy playing tf2 with their friends and are willing to wait for them instead of having an automated system 'fix' the problem by aborting the game.