The House Pride event encourages Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery players to do well in classes to earn house points, however, that is actually one of the least efficient methods to get house points. To get the most house points possible, players actually need to participate in story events where the professors offer house points as a reward. End-year story events typically see players showered in house points to help them become the top house and win the House Cup as well as a pile of gems.
So the problem is players that are early in the game have a significant advantage over those who are caught up. Those who are still in the first couple of chapters will have a much easier time reaching the end of the year and getting big house point rewards, whereas everyone else has to grind classes and earn a handful of house points at a time. Essentially, this punishes players who are caught up in the game, and unless a team has plenty of first and second year students, it could make it virtually impossible for them to win.
Simply put, this is unfair to Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery players who have dedicated enough time to the game to be caught up with the story, and it only really rewards newcomers. And since there doesn’t seem to be any other way to get the spider pet in-game, this event seems like it may upset some players, especially since pets in the game are an extra energy source.
There’s also the potential pay-to-win aspect of it, where players who can purchase more energy can rack up the most house points and guarantee themselves a victory. This could be even more problematic than the balancing issues and some may even see it as predatory. Unfortunately, Jam City hasn’t given any indication that it plans to move away from the pay-to-win aspect of House Pride any time soon.
Because of these issues, it’s clear that the House Pride event in Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery will need to be tweaked if Jam City decides to bring it back in the future. There needs to be a way for players who are caught up with the game to properly contribute to their team, and the developer needs to figure out how to make it fair for those who can’t (or won’t) purchase more energy. Perhaps the solution to the first problem is as simple as only counting house points that come from classes, not the ones from story events, but we’ll see what Jam City decides to do, if anything.
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is out now for iOS and Android mobile devices.
