I think it would be cool if there was a Blessing feature for eggs which helped increase your chances for getting traits you want. I'm gonna say like for every 3 blessings (since it will only be available every 24 hours like nurturing), you can raise your chances by 1% for a random trait slot. (So if you had a 25% chance of a gene carrying over in gene 1, it would increase to 26%). Other people could bless your eggs also, but in order to get it to raise to 35%, you would need 30 blessings.

You can make the % increase harder by making a puzzle to complete for each blessing. A puzzle that doesn't have the answers the same for everyone, like the slider puzzle in the Bandit Dungeon or the other puzzle in the Forsaken Dungeon.

As a reward for completing the puzzle correctly, you can earn 5-10 scales. I don't think anyone would be willing to bless other pets if there was no reward for them.

You can also give each account a limit on how many blessing puzzles they can attempt in a day. Or a limit on how many blessings a particular pet can receive. You can have a blessing bar and once it is filled the pet will be 100% Blessed.

The point of blessing is to give people a way to help people with projects just slightly. Also to give people something to do while waiting for their egg to hatch that may actually affect the outcome, than nurturing to speed up time. It is not intended to give pets a ridiculously high % outcome (like 25% turning into 75% or 50% turning into 100%).

I like this idea! It feels like their could be storyline conditions to increase the blessing effect. It seems like a cute feature.

I would put severe restrictions on it though.

Here are some possible restrictions I thought of. Not all would be needed:
o Personally I think the effect should be no more than 5%. And even that would be high. When you are creating lots of eggs, a small percentage goes a long way.
o (Each area you unlock via the map, your blessing increases by say 0.25%) Blessings would be tied to how much you have "saved" Sylestia. Like gaining favor.
o There is a limit on the number of blessings per week. e.g. You can bless 5 times a week.
o There could also be the alternative that you cannot bless fabled pets or themed pets, due to some story-line reason. So themed fabled pets are not affected.

Lastly, I would like to point out the con, that the frustration for having a blessed egg not have the wanted trait will be greater.

I like this idea... I would definitely love to se e something like this in game.

I disagree with Taptothebeat about the 5% restriction though... I think at that little of a chance to affect things, most people would find it not worth the effort, unless the puzzle is so easy as to be meaningless. 5% is a one in twenty chance, not much at all. If you can only do a handful in a week anyway, I don't think many will bother, and certainly not for others. 10% is a one in ten chance, better but still low I think. If there are gonna be all these other restrictions, I think a 25% chance (one in four) is not out of line.

You gotta make things like this worth it. And its gotta be fun rather than "work", grinding away at it like the nurturing is. My two cents at least.

@Greenmann,
Oh I didn't think of a puzzle at all. I was more at, "you just get these blessings." So 0 effort besides logging in.

Hmm, if it's a puzzle...it could get repetitive. What about completing a certain number of tasks a week? Where tasks vary. Like for one week it may be "help out in protecting against a raid" versus another week it may be "send a pet on a mission"?

The problem with putting a large percentage, is if it is easy enough everyone will be using blessings. So if you have the Sylestia community give 10k blessings a week, you're now increasing the number of pets with the correct trait by like an extra 2.5k. It doesn't scale well. If this were a 1 player game, then it would be different.

But regardless, I said some combination of those restrictions. Not all of. You can counterbalance 5% with being able to bless more pets. Which I think is a better way to go.

One other thing that would be interesting, is a "communal reserve" of blessing water (or whatever it would be lol). So the more people who use the blessing, the worse the blessing becomes. Or having the percentage change due to some factors.

Vamp's original idea included some kind of puzzle you would need to complete to do a blessing, thus there would be some work involved.

I think personally I would like this better if there was a puzzle (so some actual skill and time/work involved to do it), with a high percentage of getting what you want, but only able to do so a limited number of times, perhaps even once a day per person. That way the "blessing" would be worth doing, and you would have to be extremely careful about how and who you use it on.

I could see this linked up with some kind of temple or actual physical spot on the map somewhere, that you would have to go to the temple to do the puzzle, and if you finish the puzzle as your reward you can bless one of your pets.

I'm also not sure how you would target a particular gene... I think it would be more like upping the chance of any carried gene being passed along? Even this would be a huge help for those trying to do 4-6 vis lineages.

I also would say that an egg can only be blessed once, so that these blessings don't get stacked on the same egg somehow.

At any rate, its an interesting idea regardless

This is a sort of similar idea to something we have in mind for players' "Avatars" for the Revamp. We are working on creating a system where players themselves have skills and talents and one of these would be a breeding tree. As you level it up you would gain access to perks and bonuses related to breeding.... such as improved chances of getting a Visible out of two carries, etc.

By "breeding tree", do you mean a skill tree like we have in the profficiencies for our battle pets? Oh, that would be awesome! I would love to see what that might entail...

Yep. Something like that.

:O

I am fascinated by this idea.