I don’t know if the people from TH_NK read my post about cheating on Pottermore by purposeful failing at potion making, or one of the many other online forums posting about the issue, but a few days after my post went live, they posted on the Pottermore Insider blog that potions are being tweaked.
Today Sara Moton commented on my previous post to say that they stopped giving a point for failing. I have logged in tonight to test it and indeed, it is true. TH_NK has fixed this logic flaw, and it’s great.
Apparently, there was another way of cheating with potions that I never tried cause I presumed they wouldn’t base things on the system clock. In what some are calling the “time turner” cheat of potion brewing, you can simply set your system clock ahead and return to the potion page, and skip the lengthy waiting/brewing period.
I can’t personally verify that this was true, but it didn’t work for me tonight, so if it was, TH_NK has fixed this as well.
There is another form of cheating with potion making, that is not fully fixed yet. SeekerRose184 talks on her blog about people purposely failing in a catastrophic way in order to purposely lose points. The goal, is nothing short of sabotage. While the situation is being made better by apparently adding a bottom cap on personal house points of 0, it is clearly not a fix, and I’m not sure what they can do to stop this sort of sabotage.
Still, it is great to see TH_NK working to make Pottermore a better and cheat-free place. In addition to removing the free ride points, they’ve also finally varied the points on potion-making so that harder potions are now worth more points.
I am still enjoying the site and am looking forward to seeing the site continue to grow as October approaches, and beyond.
I want to give an extra thanks to Spike and Guest who both let me know in comments on my previous post that there is in fact a way to send a message to the developers other than posting on my blog. It turns out, in the Other section of the Help on Pottermore.com, if you open up the What’s next? FAQ entry, there is a little link titled “Need more help?” If you click this link (sorry it’s a javascript link so I can’t direct link it for you), you are given a small form that allows you to send a message to the developers. Thanks, Spike and Guest for letting me know about this.