Hogwarts Live Blog

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the last of seven installments of the boy wizard's adventures, will be published July 21, author J.K. Rowling said Thursday. Rowling announced the publication date on her Web site. Scholastic Children's Books, the U.S. publisher, said it would offer a hardback edition at a suggested retail price of $34.99, a deluxe edition at $65.00 and a reinforced library edition at $39.99. Amazon.com has it for an amazing 46% off the cover price, $18.89. Click here to pre-order at this price WizardCast has released a special short mini-episode with this news Click Here for Special Episode 2.5 Update: in March, the cover art for these books were released, so be sure to click the links above to see the stunning cover art for the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter Series.

The portkey to get to Devon has been removed from HogwartsLive. Just as with Episode 1, the portkey was located in Trelawney's Orb. This time when you attempted to touch the portkey you were asked a multiple choice question. The question was "What Deli Restuarant was the first segment of this episode Recorded From?" The answer, as anyone who listened to the beginning of Episode 2 of WizardCast knows, is Schlotsky's Deli ("Funny name, serious sandwhich").

Once you entered the town of Devon you could find a blue link to Edmund's Alchemy Lab. Once you entered my lab you were asked what the prize of the episode was. I stated in the closing sequence to WizardCast Episode 2 that the prize for this episode was a sample of the Elixer of Life. Which 182 of you received (Congratulations).

Once you answered that you wanted the Elixer of Life, you were asked a third trivia question, you were asked "In what city did Nick and Barbara meet up with me (Alchemist Mike Crim)?" The answer to this question of course was "Phoenix, AZ" where Episode 2's Alchemy Lab segment was recorded from.

Congratulations to the 182 people who found their way to my lab in Devon. You 182 people will continue to be able to enter my Lab and get to Devon for 2 more days, before Devon will be locked to you as well.

If you didn't get a chance to enter my lab this episode, don't fret, a brand new episode of WizardCast is coming soon, subscribe via iTunes, or visit the official WizardCast website at wizardcast.wizards.pro to find out more about WizardCast and to find out when Episode 3 comes out.

Welcome to all the new users (and some duplicates, yes we know you) who registered during open registration today, Registration is now closed. Now that registration is closed the limit for concurrent users has been raised back to the previous 125 users at a time.

We will re-open registration for new users again on Thursday at noon Pacific Time, registration will remain open until 10 p.m. Pacific Time. During the time that Registration is closed, the limit of people concurrently allowed on the server will be dropped back down to 85.

When we get the server problems resolved these limits will be removed. Please be patient with us, we are working as hard as we can to resolve these issues and make HogwartsLive a great place for ALL to play.

Ok the information about WizardCast Episode 2 was lost in the various rollbacks, so here it is again.

WizardCast Episode 2 is on the air, finally!

If you have itunes, Subscribe!

If you do not have iTunes, you can download Episode 2 of WizardCast and play it with any MP3 Player. If you want to stream the download, or to find out more about WizardCast, visit WizardCast.Wizards.Pro, the official website of WizardCast. There you will be able to listen to all episodes of WizardCast using our web based player. Also, while you are on the WizardCast website, be sure to click on our Listener Survey. If you take our survey you we may be able to get sponsors of our podcast which will help us pay for the costs involved in getting the podcast out to you.

When you've finished listening to WizardCast Episode 2, you will have all you need to find your way into my lab in Devon (not to mention find your way TO Devon) to get your special prize.

Note to everyone, do NOT tell people how to get the prize, they need to find it on their own.

Also, get your voicemails in now, if you have Google Talk, you can send a GoogleTalk voicemail to , you can also just record your voice on your computer and email it to

Get your voicemails in now because we are planning on recording parts of Episode 3 this weekend (so that it doesn't take 3 months to come out).

If you lost donator points on your account because of the rollback please owl or email me. If you need donator points refunded include the email address you used to send the donation along with the time and date of the transaction; I will manually add your donator points. If your account was deleted just remember to include your account name in the owl or email you send me.

Ok people, I didn't end up rolling back again after all, I'm hoping this will be the end of the problems, I've reconfigured the server completely. As a precaution, I'm still keeping the registrations closed for a couple days while I watch the server status closely, when we are relatively sure that the server is stable, we'll open up registrations for new user accounts again.

Also, Edmund's Alchemy Shop has been reopened, so if you have listened to the clues from episode 2 of WizardCast, find your way to my lab and get your prize, which has been slightly increased to compensate for the rollbacks.

This is a public service announcement from the staff of hogwartslive.com. We apologize for the fact that we've had to roll the database back a few times now, but there have been some severe server problems trying to fix this server. We are not purposely deleting your users, we are trying to keep the data as intact as possible. That said, everything is royally screwed up right now. We will have to do at least one more roll back of the database in order to restore any missing characters. If you registered a new character in the last 3 days, that character is gone, we are sorry, but that character is gone
We are trying to repair the damage to the server and make it stable again and we want to do only one more roll-back if at all possible, to that end:

1.We will be rolling the system back again tomorrow or this weekend.

2. The create a new character is taken down until these problems are sorted out.

3. Only 125 people will be allowed on the server at anytime. (This does not mean that your name will be deleted. Just that only 125 people can be logged in at once.)

4. The timeout time has also decreased so that people who are idle won't take up one of those 125 slots.

5. To help keep the server load down, the reset script that knocks everyone offline twice a day will, for the time being, be run at 23 minutes past the hour, every hour, keeping the database clean and memory usage as low as possible until these problems are resolved.

6. If you have donated during this and have not received your points or you donate before the server reset again please email your amount, date, and HL name to

We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but we are working as hard as we possibly can to make this game work well for you, the players

Please remember that we (the staff) are people with feelings and lives also and are doing the best that we can possibly do.

Thank you and please remember to forget where the petition button is if you are dealing with any of these problems. We are working to get everything right the best that we can.

Because of the server rollbacks Edmund's Alchemy Lab is temporarily closed, once we have the database repaired we will reopen the shop and you can return to it the same way you found it before (with the clues from Episode 2 of WizardCast) and as a special bonus to help ease the pain of all these rollbacks, the Edmund's Alchemy bonus will be increased to help people gain back some of the experience they will have lost in these server rollbacks.

The site had to be rolled back once again. Everyone who leveled over the past few days will notice that their stats were set back. This happened to everybody and everybody will have to redo what was lost. Please do not send in any more petitions regarding losing progress.

Congratulations to the new staffers (listed in order of Support Rank*):

SpinalRemains - 24
Stardust - 16
AngelinaJohnson - 14
GloryTo - 12
Necrosis - 5
Alys - 4
CelestialSiren - 4

*Support Rank is a way to measure the current standing of staff members, it is based on a variety of things, please don't ask about it, you won't get an answer and you don't need to know.

If you were nominated or made it to the final tier but did not pass the final selection process please do not owl me about why you were not accepted. Better luck next time! :)