In the end, we arrived at a new sampling protocol, applied during CASP14, that significantly outperformed earlier protocols that were developed for CASP12 and CASP13. The key advances described here are an optimized use of restraints together with moderately elevated temperatures during the simulations. This conclusion was largely independent of the ensemble selection method, either CASP12 or RWplus, suggesting that improvements in conformational sampling are more important than the exact scoring and selection protocol. The increase in temperature allowed us to sample more broadly and increase progress towards the native state. Remarkably, the improvements with the "CASP14" protocol were manifested not only in better global structure metrics, but also in local structure qualities such as the SphereGrinder score, an area where it had been difficult before for us to make significant improvements . The key for improving both global and local structure quality was the combined use of positional and distance restraints during refinement.