Re: Pottermore v.10
 

It's possible. What you are talking about is surely happening in all of the houses, but perhaps more in Hufflepuff and Gryffindor (probably also because they're way down in the standings with no hope of catching up). Some people have suggested that they should use as the weighting factor only those students who have been active in the last 30 days (or whatever period they choose to use). That would take care of a lot of the issues there.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I'm soooo pleased that Dueling is back up. I never got to play it when I first got my welcome e-mail :( and potions is much more enjoyable with less brewing time :)

This is a little off topic but has anyone run out of Galleons yet? Now that I am brewing potions again the frugal side of me is worried that replenishing my potion stocks is going to leave me broke before CoS is released and I can collect more Galleons.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

To a degree, the way it's weighed helps them, though.

Currently, there are less Hufflepuffs then Ravenclaws, and thus the points an individual member makes adds more to the total house score if you're in Hufflepuff.

The Hufflepuff house total seems to be rising somewhat quickly at the moment, thanks to dueling and some determined house members. They were in the low 70,000's but they're now up to over 80,000. I'm thinking they may even edge close to Gryffindor, and maybe end BETA in third place.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

There a handful of items you can find around the chapters so you can use those instead of paying for them.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I'm getting low, so I only brew Wideye. Dried Billywig Stings and and Wolfsbane can be re-found each time you use them, by visiting Hagrid's cabin. Snake fangs can be used many times before you have to buy them, and they're inexpensive. Not only that, the potion is worth 9 points, and the second part is fairly easy.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Even if they have fewer students, the concern is that they may have a greater percentage of inactive students, and that could still impact them adversely.

I'm not sure this is of much significance, but it's something. At any rate, I'm glad to see dueling has returned.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

My personal high is 144, but I'm usually 140-142 for a normal duel and occasionally 143. However, there are a handful of Ravenclaws on the Ravenclaws of Pottermore Facebook page who've posted scores of 145, and one person who put up a 146. (They were trying to figure out if different wand woods/cores made any difference to spell score; they don't.)

I've been working on randomly sampling a bunch of Pottermore users to try to see which pets, wand-woods, and wand cores are most common, and I've definitely come across many more abandoned, 0-point Hufflepuff accounts than other Houses. That's purely anecdotal, but about as random a sample as I can get. (There are also a bunch of 0-point, never-used accounts, which makes me wonder if those are the accounts of people who never got their e-mails, or if there are simply a significant portion of Beta testers who never used their account.)

OT for dueling but a Galleon thing: Request ingredients in your common room, you can probably get someone to send you some. Also, is anyone else hoping that they institute a way to sell created potions for Galleons? It would be nice if you could make money through brewing, and it would eliminate any possible problems that gifting Galleons could bring once the Beta opens.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

How do people even get 140 something in duels? I only ever get 120 something but I haven't tried the body bind one I don't think....do some spells give you a higher score?

How could they be people who never got their e-mails and yet be in Hufflepuff? If they never got their e-mails they would have never been sorted.

A lot of people just don't want to be in Hufflepuff.....and if the overall house points system works the way someone described above....those people are just bringing us down and I wish they would just delete their accounts if they are never going to use them anyway since then they wouldn't be getting factored into our student percentage. -_- I'm kind of angry at these people, can't really help it, because it's not like Hufflepuff was my fav house either, Slytherin was, and as you can see in my sig I have an entire Slytherin outfit even....but I still stuck with being sorted into Hufflepuff and accepted it. These other people just bother me and bother me more that they are bringing down our house percentage.

I mean you know maybe I shouldn't care that my house is in last place because are Hufflepuffs even suppose to care about that stuff? Well, I don't need to always win....but I don't like to always lose either and I don't want us to be in the bottom forever and ever and ever.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Yes, they do, and the Body Bind does give you the most points, as far as I know.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Kathleen, the Body-Bind gives the most points (my personal high is 144, others have reported up to 146.)

And you misread my post: there are a lot of 0-point abandoned Hufflepuff accounts AND a lot of unused-but-created accounts; they're two separate phenomena.

Obviously the abandoned Hufflepuff accounts were used, as they have avatars and were sorted. You can tell the ones that were abandoned because they're often left on chapter 7 or chapter 8. (People who just aren't interested in collecting will at least have gone to the end of the book, and usually manage to pick up a handful of points by accidentally collecting things occasionally.)

In addition to this, there are also a lot of 0-point never-used accounts - accounts that are registered (they show up in a random search) but have 0 points, are unsorted, and would probably show as being on chapter 1 if you were to click on their profile. There are a TON of these accounts if you randomly search the Pottermore directory. These unsorted, unused accounts show up in the directory if you search for them, instead of posting a "user not found" response, as it would if the account doesn't exist yet. The created but not used accounts lack avatars.

I would wonder how many people are actively dueling/brewing/etc.; I bet it's a small percentage of overall users. So the abandonment people are dragging you down, but so are the people who don't brew or duel - and I think the non-brewers, non-duellers are actually the silent majority of the Pottermore population, people with less than 150 points. (That number will probably change now that dueling's up, but I know before it came up, there were plenty of people who'd gone through and ended up with 0-60 points, since all they did was collect the items for points and then maybe brew a Cure for Boils or two.) Only Pottermore can know how much of an issue the Hufflepuff account abandonment is, or how much it counts. But I'd bet that a lot of people are just visiting Pottermore for the info and not dueling or brewing, and that it's just a bigger problem for Hufflepuff because of the combination of abandoned accounts and because when you're 10,000+ points behind, there may be a "why try?" attitude from a lot of people.

I get why those people don't delete their accounts, though - they still want the information and Pottermore's not out of Beta. Maybe after it opens publicly those people will create new accounts and delete their old ones, and things will change.

Edited to add: Hufflepuff has gained a TON of points since dueling went back up. I just went to the Great Hall and noticed they're only about 7,000 behind Gryffindor. I think it's because Slytherin and Ravenclaw have adopted the "duel Hufflepuff, not each other" strategy for points, but if that's the case, it should actually help to even out the House points.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I think that the percentage of people who don't brew or duel is pretty high. I wouldn't be surprised if it was 95% or more. Before they stopped showing ranks, you could tell that it didn't take a lot of points to be in the top 1%. And I think there are a lot of inactive accounts in all the houses.

I would think that a lot of those inactive people will be back when the next book is posted on the site. If you don't want to duel or brew potions, there really isn't anything to do on the site once you've collected and read everything.

Gryffindor has been about 10,000 points behind Slytherin and Ravenclaw for a long time now. Those two houses had a commanding lead before I even got in, and their lead has only grown over time. I have a feeling that Gryffindor and Hufflepuff will never have a chance to catch up. :no:

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Perhaps, but look on the bight side - this is Beta. I think once Beta ends, all of the points will be reset back to zero and the playing field will even out again. I'm also hoping people who don't want to be in a particular house will delete their accounts and get an account in the house of their choosing, if they are as unhappy as some of them seem to be.

Ravenclaw in the beginning was by far the largest house, and I think once they and Slytherin took the lead early on, there was much more of an incentive for folks in those houses to brew lots of potions.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I think I'm mostly going to use that one in duels then for the highest chance of winning the duel.

How do people do random searches on Pottermore for other users anyway? I only know how to search when I know someone's account name and I want to send them a friend request.

It's also weird that there are a lot of created accounts that Pottermore never activated....why? They did want at least 1 million beta users didn't they?

Anyway of course there are some people who don't want to take part in making potions or dueling and I also realize that until recently potions took ages to make and there wasn't another way to earn house points since dueling was down. So I understand that some people just don't want to take part in those things....I'm really just bothered by the people who abandoned their account because they didn't like where they got sorted. If they aren't going to use the account because they don't want the house they would do everyone a benefit of just deleting it so it doesn't bring the rest of us down. Hopefully after a period of time Pottermore will just delete accounts that haven't been used for like 6 months because those people probably aren't coming back.

And lol it makes me feel kind of bad that until recently I was one of those people who was in the 0-60 point range that you speak of....but it was only because my potion was frozen for over 3 months. The 42 points I had were points I gained in the only 2 days I had access to the site before my potion froze. I'm just glad that now I can earn points again. I now have 336 points.

And yes I am getting a TON of dueling requests from Slytherins and Ravenclaws. So very many. Especially Slytherin and a ton of friend requests from them too(probably mostly so they can more easily send me requests for duels).

I feel like people think Hufflepuffs are easier to beat....which in a way makes me feel kind of sad....but hey, I'm beating a fair number of them. I beat 6 Ravenclaws in a ROW earlier and I was only doing the fire making spell at the time, not even the one that is the most powerful spell.

Perhaps they are also challenging Hufflepuffs the most though because we are far behind their house in points so if we win, we aren't as likely to catch up and pass them as the other houses....so they'd rather lose to us than anyone else.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

You can do a random search by figuring out a prefix-suffix combination and then typing numbers after it. (Like I said, I've been doing a thing in my spare time where I was looking at wands and such to see if the wandlore matches the wands on Pottermore - it doesn't, exactly, elder's rare but not rarest and phoenix isn't the rarest core.) To get a random sample, I checked out where Ravenclaws had posted a giant list of people and then put those usernames in with random numbers (e.g. do a search BronzeDragon2, BronzeDragon3, etc.) You can also pick up random prefix-suffix combinations from your news feed, the Great Hall, the common rooms, or people you've been randomly matched to duel with.

I think that must be how half of the people who've sent me friend requests have gotten my specific username: I've noticed a spike in friend requests after dueling.

As for Pottermore deleting specific accounts after X months of inactivity, I think SusanBones is right - they can't just delete those accounts, because people who explored the books in August and have no desire to brew/duel would get deleted before CoS is released. Maybe if they extended it to something like 1 year post-last-login or sent a notice, but I don't think they'll do that immediately; they've got too much other stuff to worry about, like working on opening up registration and figuring out their eBook store. Right now, the way things are running on-site, I have hopes they'll open to the public in January.

And people aren't challenging Hufflepuffs because they think they're easier to beat; they're challenging them because they're farthest behind in House points. Both Ravenclaws and Slytherins have been suggesting on their respective Facebook and Tumblr pages that it makes more sense to duel Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs, since if you lose you're not handing points to the House you're in closest competition with. Like I said, that feels a bit odd, flavor-wise - if the loser had points subtracted from them it would provide an incentive to duel the House nearest you in points, but they haven't programmed it that way.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Don't you mean Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs?

Anyway, okay that's interesting I'll try doing searches like that then.

Also, so did you figure out what seems to be the rarest core and rarest wand wood if it's not phoenix and elder?

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

I'm trying to collect a larger sample, but right now, I have 876 people, and poplar and walnut are tied for rarest, with 3 people each. The one thing that could be throwing this off is that I have a disproportionate amount of Ravenclaws (273 R: 185 H: 197 G: 221 S), and Ravenclaws tend to disproportionately get elder wands; of the 8 people with elder wands I've collected, 7 are in Ravenclaw, and the Pottermore Ravenclaws Facebook page has a disproportionate number of elder wands. Still a bit of a wandlore fail in that black walnut wands are much, much more common than regular walnut.

Dragon is actually the rarest core right now, but they're fairly evenly distributed (unicorn is definitely the commonest): 384 unicorn wands, 226 dragon, and 266 phoenix.

It is actually possible to get the least flattering wand description (chestnut and dragon, which is the only wand-core combo Ollivander doesn't describe nicely) and 3 people have gotten the Peter Pettigrew chestnut-and-dragon, brittle, combo (all Slytherins, and all 6 people with a chestnut and dragon wand are either Slytherin or Hufflepuff. It isn't possible to get a 9.25'' wand; even 9.5'' wands are very rare, with 2/876 people having a 9.5'' wand.)

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Been absent here for a while... got busy with life and bored with a duel-less Pottermore when I couldn't even get my potions to work right anymore. Hoping to get lots of dueling in with the holidays!

Anywho... just wanted to say "hey!"

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Interesting.

I guess my unicorn core is pretty common then. I wonder about the other aspects of my wand(they're all in my sig)....I guess they are probably middle of the road common?

It's interesting how almost everyone who has certain wand types are in certain houses.

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

KathleenMalfoy, your wand isn't that common - only 18/876 people in my sample have hornbeam, and 8/18 have hornbeam and unicorn. Alder, black walnut, laurel, redwood, and dogwood are the most common woods I've found so far (each have 30-40 people apiece in the sample.)

Re: Pottermore v.10
 

Hey, I just realised that I have a hornbeam and unicorn hair wand too! I haven't really given it much through to be honest...