A Request to Roll Back the NC Client

[cassandraberry81897]

as stated above there is to many bugs to work with new chapter, its fine when starting a structure. But when you run a recipe the client crashes, and when it dosent it takes over an hour to do a 15 minute script.

[AsDawnBreaks]

In consensus with all-if it don't work, you can't use it.

Interesting point Phallicies made. Every so often, things need to be re-done so what you're working on is all nice and clean again, plus maybe adding in some things to help it work nice (ex. if I upgrade a C# script to use classes, or change the class structure from a garbled mess to something I could actually use).

Also, it seems to me the score weighting is off. I use idealize on a helix, gives me a nice curve, I local wiggle, wiggle, and bam-back to where I started, with a stretched (or malformed) helix, and a lower scoring one too. I'm all in favor of a wiggle that chooses specific score terms to look at.

I wish I could jump in and say, "Hey, I'll come in and help motor along with your coding!" but sadly I don't have the knowledge (I can program, but barely, with next to no experience, and I've never touched C or C++, which I assume you use heavily), plus I'm in school. However, if there is anything I can look at, test, improvise, organize, etc., I would love to know.

There's probably not much I can do now between lack of knowledge and lack of time, but anything I can do, I would love to, and I'm sure many here would love to pitch in as well.

[frood66]

I’m not going to repeat any of the above submissions – I think they are perfectly clear enough.

I fully understand the need for improvements in the scoring system and agree that progress is necessary – what I do not understand is the way this is being implemented.

It seems clear that radical change has been on the cards for some considerable time and yet the community was given practically no forewarning. This was followed by one of the shortest ‘testing periods’ we have had even after extension (which the community practically had to beg for and was, it seems, only grudgingly given) and requested information was generally very slow to materialise. Just to cap it all off the NC release was absolutely riddled with bugs, many of which I would describe as blatant. Quite frankly I feel the whole episode so far has shown little but disrespect, nearing on contempt for the community in general and a complete devil may care attitude.

I fail to understand why it has been approached this way – surely a more informed, inclusive and steady introduction, that encourages pro-activity from the community, would yield a stronger game both in terms of solution accuracy and player numbers.

This is not what we have now – indeed, it has the makings of a crisis.

A great shame….and a great opportunity missed.

[LociOiling]

I think the real issue behind the new chapter disaster is how The Powers That Be in Foldit-land treat "the Foldit community". The Foldit community has spent untold thousands of person-hours developing scripts and strategies, and who knows how many millions of person-hours playing the game, teaching others about playing the game, and refining those scripts and strategies. Suddenly, a large part of that effort is "not operational", with little explanation.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to understand how flushing something like a million person-hours or 500 person-years down the drain might discourage the volunteers who donated all that effort.

Even before this NC debacle hit, there were signs of a lack of respect from TPTB for the community. I've seen a number of chat comments to the effect that opening a feedback is an exercise in futility, and that bugs noted in devprev are routinely pushed out into production despite negative feedback. The forum system on the fold.it site is badly broken, and therefore lightly used. The group forum feature is especially weak, with group leaders unable to create sticky postings, remove postings, or even edit postings. The wikia site takes up some of the slack, but is at least mostly a volunteer effort, with little or no official participation. Also, the wikia site doesn't give groups a private spot to share information. Major features and functions of the game are thinly documented. Try to find information on the structure.IdealizeSelected() function….

Bottom line, The Powers That Be really need to share some of that power. Right now, it seems like nothing the community says is given much weight. (Insert reference to "The Matrix".) A little community input (and a lot more testing time) would have mitigated the pain and discontent that NC has inflicted.

[spmm]

I can understand the urgency to introduce new wiggle and scoring regimes (PNASPaper from last year) and I completly agree with Timo's comment requesting that this massive upgrade be 'modularised' in some way so that the players can get used to the new wiggle first and any bugs associated with it could then be managed.
Unfortunately adding adverse script and rebuild impacts at the same time makes the game very difficult to play.
Add to that the reported crashing and other difficulties being experienced by many players it becomes difficult to separate 'new standard behaviour' from a possible bug or unintended result.
Is it possible to keep the new wiggle, so we can get used to it, and rollback the other changes. At the same time documenting the changes which are breaking scripts so that it becomes slightly simpler to fix the ones we actually use.
I really don't get why rebuild has to involve cut points, is there a preferred number of segs which rebuild can successfully address?

[spmm]

Ah yes is that what it is called - they have been becoming more and more frequent over several months, NC has tipped them over. Even on CI 1

[AsDawnBreaks]

Yeah, especially with KatFish gone, we need a better way to have a connection with devs. Whether it be player liaisons, a dev that is often in chat, or whatnot. Perhaps go down the route of Eterna and have bi-weekly dev chats? At this point I think we might need weekly or daily lol.

Any way, there still needs to be some re-structuring done to make sure the problems that matter most get done, on all sides, as opposed to being haphazard, like it looks to be now from what we can tell.

[brow42]

Specifically for rebuild, I think that if the secondary structure is not loop, then it should ignore the residue type (except for pro and gly) and make the desired flat/twist shape. In other words, don't use your fragment library (or only the absolute most common fragments).

This would break any player methods that rely on rebuild in structure mode for refinement, but I don't know anybody that does this. It also would not address any fundamental problems with rebuild with no secondary structure. But at least the fundamental step of making helices would work.

I've also noticed that 'straighten helix' on a freshly-rebuilt helix attempt doesn't straighten it all the way. I have to alternate between idealize and tweak to fix the rebuilt helix. This is even with free ends (cuts).

[momadoc]

I am not one of the top scorers, I rarely get to play, but prior versions were so absorbing that I would play whenever I could. The fun is gone with the rebuild tool so nonfunctional. I raise my voice along with these others to reverse the updates and restore the fun of the best game on the internet.

[dembones]

Mixed feelings on this one. From a gaming perspective I just had my worst 2 scores in 7 months and had many of the same problems mentioned above. Since I only get an hour or two a night to mess with the puzzles this was rather frustrating spending one night trying to rebuild a helix and another trying to fix one bad loop (unsuccessfully).

This isn't just a game though, and if the old build wasn't yielding the desired results I would rather take our lumps now and hammer out the bugs in the updated version. We could revert to the prior version but this would just set things back several weeks/months and many people (including myself) may not have the time to assist in the testing.

There does however need to be clear communication on goals, status, and next steps. Right now I don't have a very good feel for those second two.

On a side note, the latest devprev client (from two nights ago) has performed much better for me and eliminated many of the rebuild problems I was having the first few days. Just need some patience to figure out what works and what does not.