I understand what you're saying. In this case since you know 500 is a top score but you only are rewarded 475.483 you've out smarted yourself. Instead of feeling good about the 475 points you've achieved, you regret the 24.517 points you are missing. It's not a bad strategy for the developers to have adopted. After all, if you remember the story of their humble beginnings Fold.it didn't do well at all at the start when positive actions were rewarded by a total score that continued to go down when negative meant lower energy state.

I like the positive results. Instead of always knowing that the actual score would be less than the results displayed in the recipe output after filters were applied, now they promise to always be equal or better.

phi16

Thanks for the feedback, bertro! I see your point, and I agree it should be easier for you to see what you stand to gain from an objective.

With positive bonus, we don't know what is the maximum bonus.

In the old system (negative and positive depending of the subject), we implicitly know, for negative ones, what is the maximum.

A way to help us would be to publish the maximum bonuses on the puzzle in a first comment (by Foldit team).

As LociOiling generously did for puzzle 1570.

Would it help to update the UI on this to do something like the following?:

475/500 points gained! - 25 points available.