jflat06 Staff Lv 1
Hey everyone!
As many of you may have noticed, we've added some features to the website - the biggest of which is Puzzle Categories.
Puzzles now are sorted into categories like CASP, Prediction, Design, and others.
You can see which categories a particular puzzle belongs to by visiting it's puzzle page, or looking at the puzzle list.
Additionally, there are new leaderboards associated with each category. You can view them by going to the CATEGORIES tab in the main menu of the website, and selecting the category that you want.
Whenever a puzzle expires, it will be included on the leaderboards of each category that it belonged to.
The scores on the leaderboards are calculated from the last X number of puzzles, with X depending on the particular category. For instance, your Global category score will be the last 30 puzzles, and your Design category score will be the last 10. Please note that these values are temporary and will likely change!
You can see exactly which puzzles are contributing to the score by going down to the Closed Puzzles section near the bottom of the category's page. Puzzles that are too old to count can be shown by clicking Old Puzzles, and puzzles which aren't yet closed will show as Open.
To go along with the leaderboards, player and group pages will now show your rank in each of the categories that you've participated in. Some of you who are near the top of your category will also notice colored stars next to your ranks!
In general, a stars will show up for player in the top 30, and groups in the top 15.
For players, top 10 get a gold star, top 20 get silver, and top 30 get bronze.
For groups, the top 5 get a gold star, top 10 get silver, and top 15 get bronze.
(Remember that this new system is still in development, and the numbers may change!)
We're going to run these new leaderboards alongside the old ones in order to make sure we address any issues with them, and to give people a chance to get used to them. In the meantime, your regular global scores and ranks will still be calculated using the old system!
Part of the motivation behind this new system is that we want to be able to post more puzzles, so that Foldit can work on curing cancer, developing new materials, solving the flu, and competing in CASP all at once. Under the old system this isn't really possible, since Foldit players are human, and have lives of their own. The old scoring system encourages people to play EVERY puzzle, and that can really suck the life out of anyone!
We've considered many different ways of accomplishing this, and we decided that the best way to do it is to let people specialize, and only play the puzzles which they're most interested in while still remaining competitive.
We realize that many of our players want to participate in all puzzles, and to address this we will be adding 'skips' to each category. Skips work in the following way: if the category has a puzzle window of 30 puzzles, and 10 skips, your score for that category will be your best 20 scores from the puzzles in the window. This should let you contribute to each category without being overwhelmed - and for players who specialize, your puzzle load will also be lighter.
We're interested in any feedback you have on this new scoring system, and we'll be having a developer chat tomorrow, June 7th at 3 PM PDT (22:00 GMT).
We will also be having a Scientist Chat with Baker Lab members EvdH and chantzt about a new Tissue Regeneration Design Puzzle that should be posted tomorrow. The Scientist Chat will be on Friday June 8th at 11:30am PDT (18:30 GMT). Hope you can make it!