[M. Bison]

I'm not sure whether the return of pug slots is a good idea. If they crashed once they could crash again and it would cause even more disruption. One of the two will also be unhappy either way. The player who crashed will argue the pug slot was theirs and they crashed at no fault of their own. The sub will also get upset about losing his !sub position and being forced to wait again after finally being able to play.

My preference is that they willingly give back the pug slot. I'd rather not make any half-assed attempts at enforcing slot returns when it's not clear whether it's for the best, and if it is for the best, then a server-side solution would be far better. If this is a frequent enough problem for people then it suggests their setup is unstable, which is a huge disruption to the game, and they likely shouldn't be playing.

If the person is trying really hard to get the slot back, then I'll help in asking for it back or sometimes I'll give up my own pug slot, but in most cases I won't take admin action either way. The only time it seems worthwhile to return the slot is when the resulting teams are extremely unbalanced and the returning player isn't likely to crash again.

I thought about making a built-in solution to this problem a very long time ago, back when I was making the PUG plugin. I didn't do it because 1). in most cases there are no subs so they can simply rejoin, and 2). the possibility of multiple crashes, which opens the door to even more disruptions. I didn't think the meager gains were worth the effort of coding it.

if the only alternative is to switch players to spec until the rejoining player has taken his place back in the pug?

Presently yes, unless you can convince people to turn off their .sub