A Note to Players from Eyewire HQ

#22

Yes! I am unsure if there are words to express the magnitude of how much I agree and like this idea/proposal and how much I agree with that sentiment. I think this scientific game, imagined, and invented by Dr. @hsseung and led, designed, developed and maintained by the Boston HQ team is,I believe, at a crossroads, does it stagnate or does it evolve into something more, something revolutionary for citizen science games? (even more than it already is).

And I think in my humble opinion that what @Atani is proposing is the leap of faith required. I do not know how to convey in words how much we can help this game, the idea behind it, the science behind it, the community and Princeton/Boston HQs with this.

I can’t even begin to imagine the full scale of the possible applications of this.

Imagine badges designed by other players in the community, imagine week long competitions designed and the blog posts written by players (and curated/approved by HQ/GMs/Game designer, this has already happened before, the start of player-made evil cubes was a week long competition called titan wars back in early 2015), imagine features and bug fixes developed by “Hacker Players” aka crowdsourced developer players who without any other payment other than the community’s gratitude (and the hacker badge lol) develop these features and/or bug fixes, (and of course, again with final approval by the Boston HQ team) thus saving weeks or even months of work time from ew devs allowing them to do other stuff, other features, either visible to the players or not. I could go on, lol.

Some of the above are already in some minor form happening, evil cubes (and soon in part Hunts) designed by players, players have helped design three amazing scripts full of helpful and/or fun features that players enjoy. The sheet introduced in this thread by @amy is I believe a very good step in (general and in this) direction.

I know that there are aspects of the duties of HQ/admins that players are not able to help or even should. Players won’t and can’t decide if the next dataset will be from a zebrafish or a monkey or a bird etc that is, I imagine, decided by the needs of the researchers/scientists and/or the research objective(s), and this is but one example I can think of now. We understand this and we understand that Boston HQ is a small team can only do so many things in a day span and there are only so many days in a week.

But if I have a plead to HQ it’s this.: Don’t see this as a power grab or power play or mind game by us, the players, the community. See it for what it really is, our desire to help you (as the famous quote from the movie Jerry Maguire says “Help me help you!” lol) and to help spearhead this game’s evolution. We are a family and if in this metaphorical family HQ/admins are the parents, then we the players are the children, so please take this leap of faith with us, help us show you that we are grown up and ready for more responsibility and I believe that this game will have no limits to what it can achieve and an even greater and more flourishing community, imagine if you will instead of logging in to find 60 players logged in and about 10-20 players actively playing to logging in and finding 400 players logged in with 100 actively playing. I can only imagine that kind of community and the size and quality of data it will generate.

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#23

Bottom line: there is GENIUS in our midst willing and able to contribute and help!!

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#25

Thanks for all the feedback on this thread.

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#26

Why are you worried about HQ?

Aside from these struggles, things are actually quite good at HQ. We are cranking along full force working toward Neo and are extremely excited about the new science paper that just came out after years of work. We’re also wrapping up a new page with a comprehensive overview of the whole science pipeline that will launch soon.

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#27

We are working on this already with the new onboarding cubes :slight_smile: So far you’ve participated by adding around 100 cubes, which is awesome!

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#28

Oh and we have decided on @JousterL’s suggestion to open a Slack channel to active player developers

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#29

Nice!!! amazing idea!

#30

Because, you’ve lost half of your staff in less than a year, those positions aren’t being filled, and you’ve added another dataset while all the while Neo looms on the horizon.
Admin presence in chat has dropped off since February, as well as a lot of the silliness and joy. (when’s the last time anyone saw grim? Last halloween?)
The focus has gone almost completely to how many cells can we complete how fast, and everyone (admins and players) just seems harried and tense now.
You’ve said yourself that y’all have a lot going on.
So, I worry.

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#31

Thanks for the clarification.

For the record, Will Silversmith is actually moving to Princeton and though he doesn’t work directly on Eyewire, he’s responsible for neuroglancer, which will be the basis of Neo. We really only lost one staff member, our designer (noooooooo!) because he got scooped up by Google. Unfortunately and somewhat ironically the lab’s budget is stressed not by salaries but the immense cloud computing costs for running convnets for the new dataset.

We’ll try to make chat more lighthearted, too. I hear Grim will be back soon… :slight_smile:

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#32

lol i think atani also meant twister going to princeton and rachel. :slight_smile:

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#33

Well, they say that the talent of a company is shown by where its’ people go after they leave, so a member of ew team now working for google is an amazing thing for ew as well :slight_smile: shows what kind of talented ppl work for boston (and princeton) HQs :smiley:

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#34

Yes but y’all also lost rprentki and twister as well.

And I can say from personal experience, when your staff decreases and the workload increases, things are seldom able to hum along merrily for an indefinite period of time.

So, for the time being, I at least will continue to worry.

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#35

Small update: just to clarify from HQ, “Yesterday we decided to adopt a clearer policy of ‘no surprises’ regarding permanent changes to user experience,” should not necessarily be interpreted as, “We’ll announce every new permanent thing we’re doing and wait for player feedback before we proceed.” The idea is more that if you are curious about what we’re doing, we can largely tell you what it is, and for major changes there will be these very transparent Beta Days. Meanwhile, people in the special Slack channel Amy’s mentioned will obviously be more in the loop about certain things by virtue of having that communication tool.

But for the sake of not having misunderstandings, HQ needs to note that for extremely minor changes or perhaps scenarios like weeks where we have a lot of stuff on our plate, we can’t 100% guarantee super-super advance notice. Sometimes it might just be Beta Days. We will try our very best outside of that however! Certainly more than in the past.

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#36

For what it’s worth, my own just-me perspective is that some of the stuff worried about above (art, blogging, etc.) is largely all right. :smile: Our new illustrator/GM Daniela is here full-time all year, which is a luxury we didn’t always have! And personally I find blog stuff to be among my most satisfying work here, while it also doesn’t take up the majority of my time. Re: our data sets, too, I apologize if anyone’s given the impression we’re under some hard deadline for the Dig! We are not trying to do e2198 at any particular speed right now, even though the data is still relevant.

I guess what I’m trying to say is no one’s sitting around twiddling their thumbs, but a lot of the areas where some players seem to wonder if GMs need “relief” are not actually that much of a bottleneck. Of course, HQ welcomes player contributions for anything reasonable, especially now for development purposes, and we’ve also created stuff like Mystic gameplay to let players contribute to a previously Princeton-only project. But I’d say that outlook is mostly about optimizing both the game and the science!

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#37

i think perhaps mainly the reason the GM are no longer so active in chat with smalltalk is that like i remember that was mostly twister and rachel doing the talking, and with rachel gone and twister moved to princeton so he have a bit more organized workhours and with both the timezone change and i guess not being able to stay up to 2-4 am each night the admins are more or less all online at the same time so looks like they are less in chat now. Offcourse it is nothing wrong in that but perhaps it make us feel as we are loosing a bit of the touch with you all.

when we are logging in at ew and wondering what would be most useful to do right now, would you prefer that the mystics choose a mystic cell if avaiable to get as many cells as possible done there or would you prefer that we choose to start completing on weight 3 in a ew cell to get it done as fast as possible.?

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#38

That’s a good observation about our presence, annkri. I’m sure the current GMs in Boston can chat a little more than we sometimes do, of course, so that you know we’re alive. :wink: But yeah, the times we’re around are less spread out now.

In terms of what’s best for players to do for cell completion, it might be a mixed bag. If all Mystics are constantly doing Mystic cells, that’s great for prioritizing zfish, but it gives the admin types checking that data a lot more work all at once. If you’re prioritizing SCing on e2198, that gives less of a “barrage” to the admins checking zfish, but it means we also have to prep e2198 cells a lot faster. There probably isn’t a best thing for Mystics to prioritize between those two choices; I’d more just see what others are already doing a lot, then do the opposite to balance it out. That way no one at HQ or Princeton is just waiting for data and no one at HQ is rushing to meet cell demand.

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#39

For science!

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