Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I don't know yet--I haven't been back since they took it down this past time--but before, when it was up, you earned five points as long as you won. Ties earned no points for either player.

I think the limit is more for game balancing (vis a vis potion-making) than for load balancing. What's the time frame for the duelling limit? Ten duels per what--hour, day, month?

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

From what I've heard, you can do 10 duels and then you have to wait about 20 minutes before you can duel again. So it's not a really long wait. :)

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I understand you receive 5 points just for winning, regardless of by how much.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Based on what I can tell you get 5 points if you win and 0 if you lose and that's how it is each time...doesn't matter by what margin you beat the person by, if you win it's 5 points and 0 if you lose. You don't lose any points for losing, you just don't get any points either.

It seems that about every half an hour it's letting me do more duels.

Anyway, I've noticed that in notifications a few people have challenged me to wizard's duel but if I go to it(even when I'm not timed out anymore with the amount of challenges I can do) when I click "Go to Wizard's Duel" on the notifications, it just takes me to the main page of the wizard duel section and I'm not sure where to go to where these specific people are challenging me because I don't see anything different showing up.

EDIT: Oh okay I see it now.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

The scoring awards you 5 points if you win, 0 if you lose, 0 if you tie.

BrianTung or someone computer-y would probably be able to better hazard a guess as to why there's a limit. My guess is that when you challenge someone, it needs to "line up" someone from House X who's challenged House Y (I'm a Ravenclaw; if I challenge a random Hufflepuff, the computer needs to find a Hufflepuff who wants to challenge a random Ravenclaw.) It can take a while for the computer to find someone; you're not typing simultaneously. At least, that's how I'm interpreting the lag between when I type out my spell and when I find out if I get points; it's taken 15+ minutes for me to find out the result of a duel. My guess is that the duel limit's in place to make that system more manageable. So part of it would boil down to keeping traffic manageable.

On the other hand, it could be to balance scoring; potions' brewing times have been shortened, but it still takes 53 minutes to do Sleeping Draught with the most expensive cauldron, and I only get 11 points for that. By capping the duels, it gives people an incentive to brew; if you could duel for 1 hour straight, there would be no incentive whatsoever to spend any time on potions. (They could've - and likely should've - tweaked the potions' point values to be worth a little more, but that's just my opinion.)

And one thing about this, in terms of feel: It's a bit odd that the best strategy for Slytherin and Ravenclaw students, particularly the latter, involves challenging Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors. After all, you don't want to be responsible for giving points to the House you're in closest competition with. (In theory, if you could get members of the bottom 3 Houses to refrain from randomly challenging members of the leading House, you might be able to hurt the leading House's ability to gain points through dueling.) This feels wrong, flavor-wise: thematically, it seems like the students in the leading Houses should want to be challenging one another, but the way Pottermore has dueling set up it makes more sense for both of them to go beat up on Gryffindor and Hufflepuff.

But those two reasons for duel limits - potions point balancing and programming/server capacity - are only theories. Anyone with any programming knowledge able to comment on the latter bit?

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Has anyone else noticed that when you win a duel and get points, it doesn't seem to get added to the overall house points? I get the points appearing on my page and all but it doesn't look like it's being added to the overall house total.

I haven't actually noticed the house total going up when I win house points in duels for some reason. :/

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

The house points are not actually the total of the individual points, but are instead a weighted sum. Because of the vast numbers of students in the houses, they scale down the points. Otherwise, the house totals would be up in the tens of millions, I suspect.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I suppose I shall be the first to report a new glitch from dueling, regarding points.

I had around 3,098 points, won a duel, and my points became 3,003, instead of 4,003.

Has this happened to anyone else? Or something similar?

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Dumb question of the day -- how do you accept an open challenge? I've started a couple and had them met by members of other houses, but I can't figure out how to take on a challenge.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Abbsalah, I'm not sure what you mean - you can issue an open challenge to anyone of a House, which Pottermore then arranges for you. There's no way for anyone to accept a random challenge; issuing a random challenge and accepting one are the same thing.

If you want to challenge a friend, you can do that by sending a challenge directly to them (right-hand side of the dueling screen, I think) or you can challenge a person you've already dueled by clicking "rematch" on the left-hand side.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I'm pretty sure the wait time when you go over your limit of duels is only 10-15 minutes. Which is pretty nice!

Does anyone have any tips on dueling in general orrrr is there a thread somewhere that has them? <3

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Petrificus Totalis is your friend. Master it. Use it exclusively. Right now, there's no reason not to: it has the highest number of possible points and isn't difficult to cast. (It helps if you can type with your fingers on the home row; I imagine this would be a LOT harder if you were a hunt-and-peck typist.)

Other than that, just practice. I would advise not practicing against others, just using the practice button on the spells page, as practicing against your Housemates appears to count towards the total number of maximum duels allowed. (Someone else confirm? I haven't used the "duel classmate" feature, but I do know if you go over the duel limit, you also get locked out of practicing with a classmate but can still practice alone.)

Finally, right now if you're in Ravenclaw or Slytherin, it makes more sense to challenge Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, as you'll gain points without giving them to the House that's closest to you in terms of points.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

okay wondering if this a glitch or not:

I sent out 3 duels today, one to a Ravenclaw to practice and a Slytherin and someone else, but its not showing them on the dueling page. is that because the people haven't accepted them or what?

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Really? Where did you get that info?

Hasn't happened to me yet but that's worrysome. :(

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I've clicked challenge a house and casted my spells in duelling and when im done the spell it says my casting potency and awaiting opponent so I click return to wizard duel. Just wondering does it just take awhile for something to happen or am I doing something wrong?

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Well, they manifestly can't be a simple sum. Gryffindor's house total is less than the sum of its top ten students, I think.

I posted some evidence that the score is indeed a weighted sum (weighted by the percentage of students in that house). An overview (with links) can be found here. One does need to pay close attention to the mathematics to follow along, however.

Granted, that was before the most recent update. I'll have to do another experiment to see if they've changed the scoring formula. I'd be pretty surprised if they did, though.

I think you've summarized admirably. In my opinion, it's two birds with one stone: They definitely needed to throttle the dueling rate to improve game balance, in my opinion. There was no good reason at all, scoring-wise, to brew potions until dueling went down for four months. It's still a loss on a per-minute basis, but it's closer now. Eventually, maybe, they'll get it right.

The load balancing rationale also makes sense to an extent. It made more sense with the original model. In the original dueling model, you could duel your friends (as you can now), but otherwise, you signed up to duel individual strangers, not houses as you do now. This made matching up duelers rather an interesting exercise, because you would click "duel" and someone else would have snapped up the dueling partner before you. I estimated, even in the early days of dueling, that I would have to try several times on average before successfully getting to duel someone. I think such a rendezvous model would not have scaled at all well to hundreds of thousands of users, let alone millions.

The current model, where you simply duel a randomly selected member of a given house, is much more sensible; it's much simpler to schedule. I'm sure the throttling helps, but it might not actually be necessary. We'll see.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

That's interesting. I wonder if that will make it harder for people in Hufflepuff like me to push the house forward though if we have a higher percentage of accounts that aren't active due to a lot of people who don't want to be in Hufflepuff....and the percentage of those people with 0 points is really bringing down our overall house percentage.

Sadly Hufflepuff probably does have a higher percentage of people just abandoning their accounts....and if house points are calculated by the overall percentage of students and we have a ton of abandoned accounts earning nothing for the house because they didn't want to be in Hufflepuff, I can't help but feel a bit angry, sadly. I don't want to feel angry, but it does bother me a bit.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I don't think I understand dueling. You challenge a house, cast your spell...and then what? Out of the around 10 tries right now I only managed once to meet a real person. Other than that, it's ''Awaiting opponent.'' Am I supposed to just wait when I get that? Right now I've waited a couple of minutes with such a screen and no change. Or can I safely go back, try other duels, and I'll receive the points later via Notifications?

Edit: Oh, nevermind. The duels just get listed afterwards. But it seems that Gryffindors are much more active, Hufflepuffs take ages to respond. By the way, what is the highest that you guys have been able to get with the Body Bind? I can't get beyond 142.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

My highest ever was 144, but I only got that once. I got 143 a couple of times. Ordinarily I don't get any higher than 142 either.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I had this same issue earlier but I think it doesn't show up until an opponent has finished the duel because I came back later and both duels were showing up.

Since potions seems to be working fine and dueling is back up I have a feeling we're closer to launch or at least some new content.