BETA CASE FILE #6: Brewing Potions

*SPOILER ALERT! This post contains images and information about my experience in Pottermore. So, if you don't want to know anything because you want to experience it all yourself, then now is the time to STOP READING THIS.

Still reading? Then I guess you don't mind, and so, feel free to read and enjoy! ^_^

So we've talked about Hidden Objects, New Material, the artwork of the Philosopher's Stone, the Great Hall and the common room. The next thing on my list of things to talk about would be on POTIONS.

After finding all the hidden objects, the only way to earn House points would be to brew yourself some potions since Wizard dueling is still down. The first thing anyone should do is to PRACTICE brewing so that they won't lose any points if they make a mistake. Brewing really takes a lot of practice since you need to consider so many things, from WHAT the ingredients LOOK like, to the INSTRUCTIONS that must be followed step-by-step, how to PICK things up, how to MODERATE the temperature, AND the TIME LIMIT. So without practice, A LOT of things could go wrong. Unfortunately, the only potion that we can practice on is the Cure for Boils, which I also find to be the easiest. Many of the people I know stick to the Cure of Boils for this reason since all the potions only lets each one earn five points.

So let's get to some of the suggestions I have regarding potions. 

FIRST, since the potions vary in their level of difficulty, I wish that the amount of points we get to earn also differed. The easy potions can still let us earn five points, but the hard potions should let us earn at least TEN POINTS. This way, it would be more rewarding and interesting to try out the hard potions. And it would help us earn more points for our Houses.

SECOND, one of the reasons why the difficult potions are, well, difficult, is because there are so many steps to complete within the SAME TIME FRAME as the easy potions. While I know that potions should be challenging, it should be at least possible for EVERYONE, young and old (remember, the site is also open to kids). So I am suggesting that the difficult potions be given at least a few more seconds in order to complete the instructions. If this can't be done, maybe the instructions could be left open for us to easily access it, or at least the time could be PAUSED whenever we take a peek at the steps. I don't know about you, but I start to get all panicky when I'm not sure about the next step and try to open up the instructions again.

Now,some of the problems I've experienced while brewing are the POTIONS LOOP, where you finish the first half of the steps, click the "Come Back Later" button, leave the page to find that your progress wasn't recorded and you need to do it again, AND; the latest issue I had was while waiting for my Forgetfulness Potion to brew, the Pottermore site was suddenly UNAVAILABLE, so when it finally became available, my potion was brewing past its time limit so I was told I failed. Given all these possible glitches, I am always afraid to click the "Come Back Later" button and just leave the window open and wait.


And LASTLY, I hope Pottermore gets to fix the issue about people cheating on the TIME for brewing. Some people no longer wait for the 85 minutes to be up, but rather, they would change their time settings to advance the time so that they would no longer wait. 


I'm looking forward to see what improvements they'll make before the site goes public. Before that, I'll just keep on brewing.