It’s been often said that the 150 points awarded when the Seeker catchs the Snitch is excessive, since it usually makes the efforts of the rest of the team irrelevant. However something occurred to me: the HP books say that very long Quidditch games, lasting days or even weeks, used to be the rule rather than the exception. In a match long enough for hundreds of points to accumulate, 150 points wouldn’t have been that exceptional. And if your team was down more than 150 points, you usually wouldn’t want to end the game by catching the Snitch anyway.
I wonder: did the Snitch used to be much harder to catch for some reason? Or have Seekers become much better than they used to be? This would explain both why Quidditch matches used to be much longer and why it would make sense to award so many points for catching the Snitch.
Maybe the Snitch can be charmed to different difficulty levels depending on the players, so that higher-level games will tend to last longer. Maybe, back in the day, there was no designated Seeker, but just seven players who sort of did everything for the team, depending on what had to be done. Probably not though, now that I’ve brought it up.
The Harry Potter series has lasted for only six years so far and in that period of time we have already been told of at least two or three huge technological steps forward in Quidditch brooms. It’s strongly implied that the brooms under discussions - the Firebolt, Nimbus 2000, etc. - are specifically designed for Quidditch. Each subsequent model seems to be vastly superior to the last, conferring an enormous advantage on the team with the newest model.
If you extrapolate that back, it’s possible that in the past, brooms were way, way inferior to what Harry and his rivals are using when he attends Hogwarts. If the brooms of 1806 were that much worse than the brooms of 2006, but the Snitch was just as slippery, then it would have been astoundingly difficult for a Seeker to catch it.
It’s not entirely unusual for a sport’s rules to become obsolete as a result of advancements in equipment, training, or strategy.
Meh. In a social game, maybe, but you don’t make the World Cup final of anything by having an attitude of “Oh well, we’re losing horribly, so we’ll throw in the towel to save ourselves further embarrassment”. Rowling invented a game with an enormous logical hole in it, pure and simple. :rolleyes:
Yeah, I know that the real explanation is that Rowling doesn’t have a head for sports, but if Trekkies and Star Wars fans can rationalize away contuinuity glitches, why can’t Harry Potter fans rationalize away a poorly-thought-out scoring system?
In that vein, I’d say that if advancing broom technology has made it too easy to catch the snitch, then they should consider changing the rules so that catching the snitch is worth less points. After all, the National Hockey League just made their nets wider in an attempt to increase scoring.
As I recall, in Rowling’s “supporting” book, Quidditch through the Ages, the origin of the Golden Snitch is explained…somehow the popularity of hunting a bird called a Snidget got incorporated into the Quidditch game, which originally did not have that element. When the bird became endangered, the winged ball was invented as a substitute. The scoring scheme, though, carried over from the days where it was an actual rare bird, and the large amount of points awarded for it was commensurate to the difficulty of doing so.
I do agree, though, that it was stupid of Krum to catch the snitch when Ireland led by more than 150 points. What did his team have to gain by ending the match sooner and losing? The ONLY reason I can imagine for doing so in any game would be to not needlessly tire out or injure the team if they need to play again soon, but that was the World Cup Finals - no more games after that for quite a while!
Yeah, in the case of the World Quiddich cup, what Krum should have done as Seeker is change his role to “blocker” and prevent the other Seeker from catching the Snitch.
So…what we’ve got someone calling ‘lame’ is a guy who puts himself ahead of the team, excels for himself to his team’s detriment, and is considered a hero.
Does anyone remember how the Snitch was explained when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was first released in theaters? I vividly remember the game announcer saying that the team that catches the Snitch automatically wins the game - nothing about 150 points and game over, just an immediate win. This of course made no sense - what’s the point of trying to score with the quaffle if the only thing that matters is the snitch? And this was during the game warmup when the rules were being explained - so it wasn’t after Harry caught the snitch and did win. I even remember turning to my wife and complaining about it. Her reply of course was “Shut up, it’s just a movie.” This was before I read the books BTW, so I didn’t know about the 150 point rule.
On the DVD, the announcer gets it right though - 150 points and game over when explaining the rules.
Does anyone else remember this, or am I creating revisionist movie history?
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I play on an online Harry Potter game where we do, in fact, have school-level Quidditch tournaments (we sort of have adult ones too, but there’s nowhere near enough players). Not only is there some very definite strategy involved in playing the game as it’s coded, not unlike a rather simpler version of chess, there is also a strategy in losing.
Bear with me here.
To get the school Quidditch cup, your team must score the most POINTS. You’d think that this would just go to whoever won the most games, but it tends to be the case that nobody comes out obviously ahead here.
Example:
Hufflepuff: won 3 games as follows:
Hufflepuff/Slytherin – 220 to 210
Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw – 300 to 250
Hufflepuff/Gryffindor – 200 to 60
Total Hufflepoints: 720
Slytherin: won 2 games, lost 1 as follows:
Slytherin/Hufflepuff – 210 to 220
Slytherin/Ravenclaw – 350 to 100
Slytherin/Gryffindor – 200 to 100
Total Slytherpoints: 760
Ravenclaw: won 1 game, lost 2 as follows:
Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff – 250 to 300
Ravenclaw/Slytherin – 100 to 350
Ravenclaw/Gryffindor – 300 to 200
Total Ravenpoints: 650
Gryffindor: sucks.
Notice that, despite the greater number of games won by Hufflepuff, Slytherin still comes out supreme in points and therefore wins the Cup for the year.
This actually happened one year, though the margin was much slimmer since games don’t tend to last more than 10 ‘rounds’ or so. A round would have each person on each team acting once. Since it’s possible for a team to get at least one goal per round if their Chasers are fairly decent (and the Beaters are usually aiming at the Seeker or at each other regardless), that’s 100 points that could go to either team. Which means that Chasing likely won’t win an individual game, but it can certainly make a difference overall – especially if the team that wins most of the individual games doesn’t worry much about Chasing strategy.
Maybe if they werre behind by a thousand points or so I could buy that. But athletes in the WC don’t give up so easily. And there’s no way the fans would be happy about that if he did.
And given that we’re told of games that went on for “months” (IIRC), being behind by 1000 points after an afternoon is nothing. Hell, if nothing else your Beaters(?) can just start playing by Slythern tactics and taking out their players. A team that can’t field enough players forfits, right?
Just to show that sudden advances are not so impossible as they seem, it might be useful to consider cricket. (It also looks to me like the arcane rules and very long time-span of games are intended to mimic cricket, but that’s by the by).
Until very recently, international cricket was played exclusively as Test matches, now standardized at 5 days long. (Some friendly matches and other oddities are shorter - 3 or 4 days). Typically, a good batsman would score something like two runs from every six deliveries.
In the 1970s (this is recent in cricketing terms), international cricket began playing one-day internationals (ODIs), complete matches played in the eponymous single day. In comparison to Test cricket, where your team batted until losing 10 wickets or unable to field another batsman, in ODIs each team bats for a specified number of overs - thus it’s better to score runs fast, even if it costs you your wicket, than to have an interminable stand for 50. As a result of practice in ODIs (and some technological improvements in bat design) international cricketers noticed that they could actually happily score runs at 4-6 per six-ball over without hugely increasing their chance of getting out. They’ve now brought this skill back into the test game, resulting in a substantial change to the way cricket is played similar to the changes we’ve seen in quidditch through the course of the books.
Now, I doubt J. K. Rowling has ever watched a cricket match in her life, so I don’t think this is her reasoning. I think it does indicate that sometimes things like this happen even in real life, though, so it’s not unassailably a flaw in the world design.
