I've been over this subject a few times and it has gotten results, so I'm gonna talk about it again. The main purpose of this topic is to point out some things that are kind of holding the minigames back and provide a possible solution.
Castle wars
The main complaint about this minigame is afkers, people see them as deadweight to the team and get pretty upset about them. First off I'll adress why there are so many afkers: simply being inside the minigame is more significant as far as rewards go than actually contributing to the victory condition. The amount of value people get in extra tickets does not make up for the effort that they have to put in, at least, that's likely what people that afk inside the minigame are thinking.
A possible solution to this is shifting the majority of tickets towards contribution, rather than participating. Currently you get 5 tickets for being in the losing team at the end of the game. This is the same amount of tickets you would get extra for taking 5 flags to your base by yourself or for killing 25 players. The numbers make participating feel kind of insignificant. This should be changed, as it devalues contributing to the victory condition of the minigame.
First off, the participation rewards should take a huge hit. Losing should go from 5 to 2 tickets, winning should go from 10 to 5 tickets. This absolutely destroys any reason anyone would afk in the minigame.
Contributing should directly give you more tickets. The amount of extra tickets you get for a flag should go from 1 to 5. For every flag captured the entire team should also recieve 1 extra ticket, this would not count for the person that gets the flag. Contributing to killing someone holding a flag will give you 1 ticket, getting the kill (doing the most damage) will give you 2. The people you have to kill for an extra ticket should be lowered from 5 to 3.
Lower levels may suffer from this, so they should recieve some compensation as well. The npcs around the castle could be used for this. Currently I find that immediately putting 10 range/mage npcs on the wall right at the start of the game is a bit too much. Especially considering they hit pretty high and pretty often, even if you wear defensive armour. The npcs also feel a lot stronger than they should be, they are quite difficult to kill, their hp should be lowered. The game should start off with no npcs present.
Some player effort should be put in to summon them. This can be done by charging an orb located on the same floor as your respawn room. Charging it will lower your defence and drain your prayer. Charging it for a certain amount of time will summon an npc, and the players charging it will recieve an extra ticket. Npc spawning will be faster if less npcs are present and if more players are charging. If all npcs are present they will be healed and get a boost to their accuracy up to a cap. Npcs should recieve bonus damage/accuracy to flag carriers as well, giving people a valid reason to start using the underground passage. Killing 5 npcs also results in an extra ticket, killed npcs will only respawn if the orb is charged.
Rewards shop does kind of need improvement, aside from brawlers, but I haven't come up with anything for that yet.
Pest control
Farming, farming, farming, it's what pest control has been all about. People downright flame eachother over killing spinners and not defending, pest control generally doesn't feel like too much fun to me because of that. From a design perspective it's also not a very good thing for the victory condition (killing all the portals) to not be lined up with the best way to earn tickets. The minigame isn't played the way it should be. The update that made it so that all the portals had to be killed for this brought great improvement to this, however it did not kill off farming entirely.
The major factor in recieving tickets should be killing the portals, not dealing damage. A time dependant multiplier should be added, this serverely increase the amount of tickets you get for finishing early. There should be a base amount of tickets earned when doing a set amount of damage to portals as well.
The rewards have taken a big hit since void was made tradable and elite void was made better than normal void. People no longer need to play pest control to obtain void. The sudden supply of void sets when it was made tradable pretty much obliterated any kind of demand there was for the set. This was impacted even worse when elite sets were made better than normal ones, as the normal top & bottoms are now kind of useless. The only things that are kind of worth getting from pest now are ring of vigour and the exp rewards. Don't get me wrong, making void tradable was definitely a good choice.
To solve the problem of normal sets being useless I propose we do the following: Any elite sets lost on death will turn into normal sets. Normal sets are upgradable with pest control tokens. Elite sets will also become untradable. This will at least put the normal top/bottom into a cycle of being upgraded, degraded and traded and thus create demand for them.
The fact that the sets aren't sinked is quite a problem though. I don't have any good solution for that currently. What we could do is make them disappear on death in pvp, but that would kind of bring us back to people not risking anything when using void.
I want to bring up defenders here as well. They are in a similar situation as void but are in a worse state. I feel it wouldn't be a bad idea if we had them disappear completely or turn into a low amount of cash (something like 50k) up until 20 wilderness. In fact that may be a decent solution for a lot of items commonly used in pvp that are oversupplied.
Feedback is appreciated.
