Amendments to the Hunt III

Hello Eyewirers,

We’ve received some mixed feedback about the results of our Winter Games, and feel you deserve a response from HQ.  We know that many of you were very excited about these games, and were disappointed when technical and management errors occured during play.

Much of the upset was due to major problems in the Hunt caused by an excess of rogue mergers.  Our competition had 15 official mergers, but many players found extra ones that were mistakenly dropped in when our Hunt cell was copied for competition use.

Faced with this emerging problem, we thought a good solution would be to add the sneaky mergers to the regular merger count and give credit to those players who found them.  In retrospect we realize that this might not have been the best fix, as it quickly altered the competition rules without fair notice to participants.

As a way to level the playing field, we’ve decided to post the competition results as they would have stood without the addition of the unofficial mergers.  We will not remove badges from players who received them under the original results, but we will add new/higher level badges for players who earned them under the new results.  We hope this helps to repair some of the hard feelings felt by our players.

The following players earned these medals under the original 15 mergers:

Gold: cdaywalt66, nkem, grizle, a5hm0r

Silver: crazyman4865, susi, EllenRipley, uzenik, lilmoo

Bronze: addieye, kshearer, jax123, b_hailey, marhav

In the future we will do our best to make the rules of our competitions clear and easy to follow.  We will make a point to increase pre-game testing in order to minimize technical problems.  We will also develop a more concrete back-up plan in case issues do pop up, and make it clear to players as well.  As you know, Eyewire is a scientific experiment, and we are always trying to make it better and stronger, for the sake of furthering science!  We hope you will forgive us our mistakes, we are learning as we go along, just as you are.

We hope that even with some large hiccups, you still enjoyed many of our Winter Games.  We love our Eyewire community, and are always trying to keep it healthy and thriving.  We are happy we’ve received so much feedback about these games, even if it wasn’t always positive, because it shows how dedicated our community is to making Eyewire the best it can be.  To everyone who has worked so hard to make Eyewire the place it is today, we have nothing but gratitude.  Let’s work together to keep Eyewire growing and evolving.

Thank you for all your dedication!

The Eyewire Team