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Harry Potter the MMO

Summary

Pottermore is essentially Harry Potter the MMO, sponsored by Sony, though it is a bit more complicated than that. Pottermore is supposed to be a "virtual and interactive retelling" of all 7 Harry Potter books. What first came into everyone's mind was that players would be students at Hogwarts during the events of all 7 books, experiencing the events similarly to how the normal wizarding public would have experienced them. It would also include Wizard Duels, Potions Making, your own wand tailored to you, being sorted into one of 4 Hogwarts houses, learning spells, getting your own magical pet, backgrounds on characters that weren't in the book, and possibly more down the line like being able to transform. Okay, doesn't sound that bad. Maybe even fun!

But how it turned out was that it is literally a retelling of the books, with just chapters of the book just put in front of images that you click on, and finding out useless background facts (like why a particular street received its name!). People also were not allowed to pick their usernames, leading to everyone having Neopets usernames due to it being an all-ages site. Fun.

By Chapter 5, players are actually able to take a wand quiz (to find out about their wand details). At Chapter 7, they take their sorting house quiz. This is, hands down, the only real thing players of Pottermore will ever care about since fans will no longer have to speculate about what house they will fall into, and can just take the officially sanctioned quiz. And after that, you compete for points for your house. This is done by brewing potions, which takes literally an hour and a half to brew so players just sit waiting for the potion to finish. What about Wizard Dueling, you ask? While that's been down almost the entire time of the beta. It only went up when public registration started.

The game is also extremely buggy due to the number of people, refusing to load often. There isn't a forum, but players can comment on the Pottermore chapters. Commenting is a terrible experience in its own right, since comments don't show up until weeks later and the mods are fascistic in how they censor people. Often, the only comments you see are of people praising the buggy site thanks to the mods. So much for an immersive experience.

Origins

The road towards "Pottermore" was filled with drama, as expected, due to absurdly poor planning on JK Rowling's part, but more importantly, Sony's part, showing how little either care about their cash cows and fanbase.

The Magical Quill Quest

Originally set to be open to the public on July 31st, 2011, things got complicated do to the influx of people causing servers to crash. The same day, it was announced by JK Rowling that they will be beta testing, with a lucky million that will be the testers before the site goes up publicly on October 1st. How they will get the first million is by having fans play a "Magical Quill Quest" in which fans had to run all over the web to find a hidden quill, which will give them a question. The answer to the question would be the number used to become registered to Pottermore that day, running across 7 days and each day having a max number of players accepted. Of course, this didn't stop people from creating multiple accounts, and then these same people selling them for high prices on eBay, since registration would close out merely after an hour when the question went up, which was usually 4 in the morning. Later days had the questions go up later to no avail, since that made the questions only close out faster driving the prices ridiculously high on eBay.

"Beta Testing"

After people were registered, fans sat doughy-eyed and hopeful, waiting for August 8th, the day after the last question and the day Pottermore would go up for the beta testers. Now, one would think that people would be let in by the order the register, with the first getting in first and so on. NOPE. What happened that people were let in randomly, disregarding all logic, and no one knowing who was doing the choosing. People were let in very slowly so the servers could handle the people. So slowly, in fact, that there was a Noah-like flood of users let in on the very last two days of beta testing, causing servers to crash completely for the last two days before the October 1st deadline. How no one at Sony did the math to see how many people needed to be let in each day so everyone was beta testing before the deadline is astonishing, what's even more astonishing was how servers were not updated to handle for the exactly predicted number of a million users before even the deadline was up. Even more astounding, Pottermore beta testing wasn't even finished by the time October 1st rolled around, meaning the site never went publicly at it's attended time, making this twice this happened. It was actually extended to October 28th, 2011... before it was extended again but this time with no "official" date announced. Even worse, no one, not even Sony, knew when their beta-testing was to be finished. Bravo, Sony, bravo.

In early March, Sony did finally announce Pottermore would be open in early April 2011. Eventually, Sony did open a Pottermore "store" (mainly just ebooks and audiobooks of the Harry Potter series) on March 27th, 2011. Public registration finally began in April 14th, 2011. It was met with public apathy.

Current status

Pottermore has been "open for registration" since April 14th, 2011 though no one has been playing it due to Pottermore's infamy of being terrible. Book 1 is still the only section that is accessible, with Book 2 probably being accessible by 2025.

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