Let me start off by saying I’m a really big fan of Wizards Unite and try to get people to try it all the time.

I like the differences between it and PoGo, I play it on a daily basis, I just leveled up to 44 last night and I’m close to Gold on the Oddities IV page thanks to its recent event. But this recent event has really started to grind my gears as far as the game is concerned and the state it currently finds itself in.

Just this week we had a random post telling us about February’s full itinerary of events, several of which were quite unexpected with three sets of Brilliant Events already running in this short month.

We know there’s a bit of a backlog going on at the moment with the Darkest of Times event clearly overrunning because of Adventure Sync, but because of that, we’re getting some awful event cross over with neither of them complimenting the other.

And that’s been a huge source of frustration for me over the past 48 hours because all I’ve been seeing are the infuriating 3km Brilliant Portkeys – of which, you only actually need 5 Griffin Statues from to finish the page.

This Brilliant Event has been running since February 4th and will keep running until February 11th, and yet my map was predominantly filled with the little inconveniencers during an event that was heavily reliant on you gathering other things from the map.

The logical thing would be to turn down those spawns slightly if you’re going to have overlapping events and put a focus on the limited time assets. Yet it felt like quite the opposite.

At one point yesterday while walking around, I encountered FIVE Brilliant Portkeys in one area, all spread out and clustered everywhere. Not a Peculiar Portkey in sight. Or one of those rare Dragon Eggs.

I get it, you want people to click on the things you’ve created, but people already had a lead in time to gather these portkeys before the Book Night Event started, and they still have another three and a bit days to gather them after. They weren’t going anywhere. But at times, you really couldn’t tell which was the preferred event.

In fact, myself and others I play with in my community accidentally picked up these portkeys multiple times, taking up precious space in our inventory when we’re on a time-sensitive event, trying to make the most of the incredibly rare dragons and get their Dragon Eggs. And it’s hard not to feel like that’s what the developers were hoping for because of how many spawn and where they spawn.

Dragons are rare. Who knows when we’ll get a chance like this again, especially since there’s only one per region.

Speaking of, in my area we were swamped with Goblets of Fire. Which is incredible for those who’d managed to get their Quidditch Harrys and Through the Ages books beforehand, but less so for the rest of us who’d stuck the foundable down within an hour of the event starting and weren’t able to make any more progress on the page.

Dragons were much less frequent. In fact, our regional dragon – the Welsh Green – was barely present half the time. That, I understand, as we won’t be seeing the Peruvian Vipertooth anytime soon, but the balancing was just completely off and meant that I, and many others, just missed out achieving Gold on the page or going even further because we were waiting for the other.

Some people in my Community were able to do it, of course, and attacked the event aggressively, out at all hours. The opportunity to finish the page was there if you wanted to take it, but you either had to have a lot of spare time, an opportunity to travel, a lot of inns nearby, or a car. Maybe all of them. It didn’t help that we barely had any notice about the event either, so no one really had time to plan.

Personally, I just wish this event had been left uninterrupted by all the Brilliant Foundables and Portkeys. It’s one of the best events we’ve had in the game in recent months and it was diluted by the increasingly dull purple assets that we are all over-catching because they’re overriding everything else on the screen.

You can’t prestige those pages – sure, you can get far too many runestones and family XP – but they quickly become uninteresting after the first few days and are running for far too long. And now, it seems, they’re also being prioritised over more interesting events.

Meanwhile, some of WU’s other interesting features – Wizarding Challenges, Potion Brewing, SOS, Talent Trees, and Achievements – are just being ignored. The dailys haven’t changed since launch and we’ve still got the same rewards  – enough with the Granian hair! –  there’s not many tasks or rewards to incentivise people to keep gifting up, or any genuine reason to be dishing out the dull Spell Energy and Ingredient Gifts. And there’s no new enemies being added to chambers or new tiers to try out.

Fortressing is such a smart, clever inclusion and is easily WU’s most interesting feature, but aside from a very brief Basilisk event – which should have felt more like a boss battle rather than a creature you can one-shot – it’s being largely forgotten about. Even some new Challenge Rank pages would be nice.

It feels like Portkey Games and WB want to make another Pokemon GO, with an emphasis on Community Days and Brilliants – which, I guess, are the equivalent of Shinies – but they’re missing the key things that make Wizards Unite different and interesting. And the attention of core players is really starting to wane.

We’re over six months in and Adventure Sync has just been added. It should feel like a big deal and something of a reset for a game that’s been struggling to find its identity and rhythm, but instead, WU still feels like it’s floundering and is failing to attract new players.

Most of that pre-launch hype for the game has fizzled out because, for some reason, people are convinced you have to like Harry Potter to play, or those that got into it because of Harry Potter have long since ditched it. Something isn’t clicking.

To be honest, diluting one of your more interesting recent events with the same old things probably isn’t helping either.

What do you think about Wizards Unite six months in? Do you still play? Let us know below.