Ideas that will be ignored, number 462: Reinventing the gift system

Gifts in Istaria are a nice thing - they can be cast on you by other players (or yourself) with each adding a temporary, but long, two-hour bonus to a statistic. As you go up in levels, you get additional gift slots, so these nice little bonuses can stack up. The power of the bonuses also increases as the caster gains levels and although they aren't huge, they can make a real difference.

Since the game was launched, though, there has been a static number of gifts - namely bonuses to the games four main stats (Strength, Dexterity, Power and Focus) alongside Speed, Alacrity (which speeds up your casting) and Armour. In addition, dragons get Velocity (for flying speed) and Dragon's Gift (adding to their specific abilities).

Now I'm not criticising the system, quite the opposite - gifts are useful, scale well and are a good element of the game. However, I think the developers are missing a trick with them. I expect they would be a relatively easy thing to introduce more of, so why not firstly have some fun, and secondly add some really good high level ones to quest for?

Seasonal things, for example, could be fun. Istaria does good events for the likes of Halloween and Christmas, but they could be spiced up with some fun gifts - silly stuff that, when cast on you, you had the choice to accept. You could jingle as you walked, have a different appearance, or sprinkle snow behind you as you ran - who knows. But they could also be a little malicious too - perhaps there could be an extra slot for pranks at Halloween, for example.

At the other end of the scale, you could add quests where the reward was a high level gift ability (not formula, so keeping it as a hunting prize), perhaps in line with a character's class. It would be good if they were level 100, say, but each character could learn achieve only one, aligning them to a certain class (which is sadly lacking nowadays, with so many multi-level 100s roaming around).

Thee bonuses could add extra bonuses when fighting certain types of creature, or in certain places in the world, maybe they would buff healing spells or increase fire damage versus the withered Aegis. The list of possibilities is endless. If you've got any ideas, please post a comment. You may even get a prize for being the first ever person to comment on my blog :p

If you happen to have landed here from the moon and haven't realised this blog is about the MMO (that's 'massively multi-player online' game) Istaria, which you can play for free, go check out its official site at www.istaria.com