I've decided to put this page up as a record of my thoughts on the Pottermore Beta. My username on Pottermore is ChaserQuaffle211. I'm sorted into Ravenclaw house.
There are a number of issues that prevent Pottermore from maximizing its potential.
The inter-student communication model is too hobbled. It has a few properties that make it unusable for anything beyond "Hey, I like this!" or comments of that ilk.
First of all, too great a fraction of comments are moderated, and the moderation time is--if you'll pardon the expression--immoderately long. My most recent approval took about five weeks. This means that anything approaching a real-time conversation is more or less impossible. (I also think the approval time for drawings is too long. One shouldn't have to wait months to hear, yea or nay.) It's difficult for me to believe that an automatically expanding whitelist--of the sort that the Insider suggested Pottermore was using--could still take that long for the majority of comments.
Even that would be OK, if comments could be threaded. But Pottermore doesn't thread conversations, so that's out.
Or, one could limit comments to friends. But unfortunately, Pottermore (at least the last I checked) does not include the user himself or herself in that subset. So again, that avenue for conversation is closed.
Or, one could allow searching for @names or #hashtags. But Pottermore doesn't do that, either.
Or, one could have a personal (though public) space for user-specific comments, sort of like a Facebook wall. But again, Pottermore doesn't do that.
Resolution of any single one of these would serve to make inter-student communication more generally usable. (I especially don't understand the exclusion of the user from the friends subset. Maybe this has been fixed.) As it stands, however, it seems usable only for squeeing and griping.
I'm sure the Pottermore staff knows about the numerous potions glitches. I won't belabor that issue.
Related to that, however, is the tremendous imbalance in points between potions and duelling (if that ever comes back in its original form). I was fortunate enough to try duelling in Pottermore's early days, and one could easily manage to duel an opponent a minute. Assuming that ties don't happen too frequently, one might imagine that an average duellist (winning half the time) could earn five house points every two minutes or so, or about 150 points per hour.
Potions are a completely different matter. The shortest potion takes a bit over eighty minutes, assuming that one assiduously watches the clock; the longest takes just over a hundred. Before the update in the points schedule, the fastest one could hope to earn points was five minutes every eighty minutes, or a bit under four points per hour--forty times slower than with duelling. Even after the update, the best one can do is eleven points in a hundred minutes--about six or seven points per hour, or 25 times slower than duelling.
What's more, duelling was free, while brewing potions costs Galleons. Granted, the ingredients cost is fairly low on a per-potion basis, but many people lost cauldrons, and those weren't cheap. So, when I say that users are given enough Galleons, that's with the understanding that cauldron exploding is a rare occurrence. (I exploded one once, and ended up in one of the infamous potions loops. However, I was able to get out of it, possibly under my own power. Details can be found here.
In my opinion, there must be something done to remedy that imbalance, assuming duelling comes back as a points-earning activity. (And I think it should--having only one long-term avenue for earning points is a bit boring. I understand the desire to keep people from gaming the system to earn points, though.) Either the points for potions should go up, or those for duelling should go down, or both.
Or one could put a throttle on duelling, so that you can only duel so many times per hour. Or one could make it possible to sell successfully brewed potions for extra Galleons, to offset the cost of ingredients and ruined cauldrons. (I have brewed Wideye probably close to a hundred times. What else am I going to do with all those bottles?) Or something.
I've also previously written about an interesting dependency in the house points competition. To make a long story short, there is fairly definitive evidence that the house points are computed as a kind of weighted sum of individual points, where the weights are apparently proportional to the house's percentage share of the school's population. There is consequently a weird side effect in that although the long-term behavior of the house points is equally shared by the individual points and the house population (as it should be), the short-term behavior is dominated by the house population. The overview can be found here, and the experimental data showing the short-term behavior and its correlation to house population share can be found here.
The dependence in the short term is strong enough to account for the majority of instances where Ravenclaw (my house) suddenly plummeted or rose in the standings, relative to the other houses (usually Slytherin, but early on, Gryffindor as well). It took some doing to convince the Pottermore gatekeepers that I wasn't just griping about the house point totals, that I was pointing out a probably unintended consequence, but they did pass it on to the technical staff. I think.
It may seem from my comments as though I don't particularly like Pottermore, but that's not true. I like Pottermore a lot, and when it was up, I went to it very frequently at first, and still occasionally. I continue to brew potions, even though most people find that rather boring. I'm probably not the typical Pottermore user.
Nonetheless, I see a lot of oddities in the way it's constructed, oddities that I think prevent it from being the really fantastic experience it could be. I like Pottermore enough to hope that they get resolved constructively.
Copyright (c) 2011 Brian Tung (see copyright notice)