Pottermore
—David Mitchell, The Guardian | ||
Pottermore (aka Pottermoar) is a semi-vaporware website designed to keep the Harry Potter franchise alive until Hollywood inevitably reboots the movies in the year 2023. Pottermoar features a scavenger hunt game for five-year-olds, a Farmville-esque potion brewing game ("You left your computer for more than two hours; Your potion is wrecked"), and "dueling" (a.k.a. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 2: Electric Boogaloo).
July 31, 2011: The Magical Quill Challenge
Users were allowed to register for the site's beta by answering challenging Harry Potter trivia questions, such as:
—True Harry Potter fans instantly know the answer. | ||
There were seven days of registration, with the most die-hard fans snagging all of the invites on day one. The Pottermore web site stated that access would be first-come, first serve, but that turned out to be a load of shit.
—pwnd | ||
You Have Been Accepted Into Pottermore Please be patient
—Typical Pottermore conversation on Internet forums | ||
Hundreds of thousands of users were supposed to gain beta access in early August 2011, but only a few hundred were let in every day. People in various forums were quick to blame the delay on Superparty London '11, ignoring the possibility that Pottermore may have been designed and built by a gaggle of tards. Either way, the net result was massive amounts of butthurt among millions of loyal fans. Many fans feared leaving their computers for five minutes because their Pottermore access email might arrive and they would miss it.
{{quote|Here we are, two days away from September. Another tweet went out this morning about welcome emails, and I'm still staring at an empty inbox. None of the placating tweets, emails, blog updates, or explanations have made me feel any better about not getting into Pottermore yet, which I thought I'd be happily exploring a whole month ago.
I have to admit, it's starting to feel like my Hogwarts letter will never come.|
BAAAW
House Sorting
Fans who did get in were very excited to be sorted into their Hogwarts houses. In Pottermore, house sorting is accomplished by taking a multiple-choice test - you know, something EVERY homemade Quizilla quiz was doing about ten years ago.
JK Rowling, in a brilliant troll move, designed the test so that everyone would get sorted into the "wrong" house. Evanna Lynch, a.k.a. Luna Lovegood of Ravenclaw, tweeted about her Pottermore sorting hat experience:
The best part is once you are sorted into a house, that's it; You can't go back and retake the test. Because of this, every user who was sorted into Hufflepuff immediately stopped playing.
Previous Quote | Next Quote
The House Cup
After you are sorted into your house, you can brew potions or duel other students to gain points (read: gold star stickers) for your house.
The first House Cup was won by Slytherin, who ran away with the victory by racking up 71,815,917 points.
Since then, many players have gone all out to make sure their house wins the House Cup, up to an including creating fake profiles, intentionally trying to get sorted into Slytherin, challenging their other accounts to duels, and then losing on purpose.
On the 22nd of November, 2012, when Slytherin looked like, once again, they had victory within their grasp, victory in the second House Cup was instead awarded to Gryffindor, who scored a vast number of points at the last minute, causing a tremendous amount of butthurt for all the Slytherins who'd been playing who felt sure that they'd win again.
Rumors persist that the House Cup is actually rigged so that every house wins it at some point, thus destroying any actual incentive anybody might have for playing Pottermore's stupid anti-fun minigames. These rumors seem to be supported by the fact that now, despite Slytherin and Gryffindor both scoring ridiculous numbers of points for their houses every day, nobody can now seem able to keep up with faggot house, Hufflepuff. Fucking Hufflepuff.
True to Harry Potter canon, the house that wins the House Cup receives no prize or honor, yet nobody seems to notice.
Brewing Potions
Positively the worst activity invented, Brewing Potions is a minigame that goes like this:
- Crush ingredient into powder.
- Sprinkle X dashes of crushed ingredient into cauldron.
- Heat your cauldron and stir clockwise X times. Don't overheat the cauldron or it will fucking melt.
- Wait 85 minutes then come back. If you wait too long your potion will be ruined.
- You have exactly three minutes starting now GO.
- Crush more ingredients and add to cauldron. Stir cauldron clockwise exactly X times. Make sure you make big mouse movements or your potion will be ruined.
- Run out of time before you can wave your wand over the cauldron. Your potion is wrecked.
- Optional: Go back to step 1.
- Rage-quit
- ????
- PROFIT!!!
The genius of this game is its ability to be simultaneously boring and nerve-racking. The gameplay was clearly designed in the spirit of early 90's educational games for the Macintosh LC, and yet three minutes is barely enough time to go through the steps.
Players are willing to endure this because every successful potion will net your house 5 points.
Failure > Success
But wait! It turns out that fucking up your potions over and over is was better than doing it right.
As of mid-September 2011 players no longer get points for failing.
Dueling
Nobody knows what Dueling is. Pottermore's dueling feature has been offline since late August; more than half the site's lifespan.
Initial User Impressions
October 1, 2011: Pottermore now open for registration
Lol, just kidding. In a move nobody saw coming, Pottermoar's grand opening was delayed for another month.
Reactions
Just as only a time traveller could predict the delay of Pottermoar's public launch, the Internets' reaction to the news was equally unforeseeable.
—A super cool girl who has the whole world figured out | ||
—Some bitch who thinks bright-cyan text on white BG is legible | ||
October 28, 2011: Pottermore now open for registration, for real
LOL APRIL FOOLS
Somebody should have told Rowling
The Harry Potter 7 Part 2 Blu Ray disc, released for the Christmas 2011 season, opens with a promo video for the Pottermoar site. JK Rowling ends the video by saying, "Pottermore is open for registration."
Pottermore On PS3
Last Thursday, J.K. Rowling announced that a new version of Pottermore would be available to play on the PlayStation 3 by utilizing the system's PlayStation Home feature that nobody likes.
See Also
External Links
Unique Online Harry Potter Experience
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Pottermore is part of a series on Visit the Sites Portal for complete coverage. |
