International Marching Arts Association [Official Thread]

[Arcantova]

We've already discussed what the president should do during the circuit, but I'll outline it again here.

There should be one officer, and then the IMAA council. To be on the council, a nation should have posted corps information and made at least 2 RP posts over the course of a circuit. They'll be automatically added if they meet the requirements. If they don't post at all in 2 subsequent circuits afterwards, they'll be automatically removed. The council will do host voting, president voting, and constitutional amendment voting.
The president can be nominated by anyone on the council, but the president must be a council member already. 2-circuit terms, but they can serve up to 2 terms in a row, before having to let someone else serve. They will operate circuit signups, start the circuit threads, keep track of RP bonus and ranks throughout the circuit, and organize records and such for scores.

I believe we had discussed this in the past with the Beta Committee thing, so these terms still work for me. If anyone else would throw in their two cents though, that would be nice.

[Drawkland]

So, after forgetting about all this for 2 months (sorry and all), I decided I'll just get going and draft the constitution now. Drum corps season is now, and so it'd be nice to have the first "real" circuit going soon.

IMAA Constitution Draft
So we can actually have a system

1. Administration

a) Committee
i) The IMAA shall be ruled by a President and the IMAA Committee, which will do all the administrative work for the organization.
ii) To be admitted into the IMAA Committee, a user must post at least 2 RPs (one of which could be corps information) over the duration of the last circuit, OR by hosting at least one competition during the circuit. They will be admitted at the end of the circuit automatically.
iii) Committee members "renew" their membership by posting at least once in subsequent circuits. If 2 circuits go by with a user not posting, they will be purged from the committee automatically at the same time that new members are admitted.
iv) The roles of the committee are outlined in later sections of this constitution.

b) President
i) The IMAA President will be in charge of the committee, as well as the driving force behind each circuit.
ii) The president will serve terms of 2 circuits. They can serve 2 consecutive terms before being required to not run for the next term. The president can serve as many terms as they wish, as long as the terms do not exceed 2 consecutively.
iii) During the final circuit before a president's term ends, Committee members may nominate other committee members to serve the next term. At the end of the circuit, after the president completes their final presidential obligations, committee members vote among the selected candidates.
iv) Votes are done in instant-runoff fashion, and should be administered by the president. The selected winner will be the official president for the next 2 cycles.
v) The IMAA nation's password will be shared to the new president for their administrative use (only).
vi) The president's role will be further detailed later in this document. They must promise to be active enough to keep the organization moving during their term.
vii) If the president is unable to complete their duties, they must be fulfilled by the most recent active president, or the most qualified committee member. If the president fails to complete their duties, their term ends at the end of the current circuit regardless when it occurs.

c) Voting and Constitution
i) Voting will always be held by the President, who collects and tabulates votes by whatever method they find most convenient.
ii) Additions, modifications, and subtractions from this document can be proposed by a Committee member at any time. The president then holds a voting session if the proposal is seconded.
iii) New changes to this document will come into effect the circuit after the proposal is approved, if at all.
iv) Presidential votes will be done by instant runoff, all other votes will be done by simple Accept/Deny/Abstain vote.

2. Circuit Runnings

a) Startup
i) After sufficient time has expired since the end of the last circuit, the President shall open up signups for the next IMAA circuit.
ii) There should be only 2 or 3 circuits held per year. Signups should last at least 2 weeks, exact length at President's discretion.
iii) Nations signing up should provide at least a Corps name, and skill levels for corresponding captions. Any other information is optional and are requested at President's discretion (trigrams, show names, show lengths, etc).
iv) Proposals for potential competitions to be held during the circuit should also be held. Any nation who's previously competed in IMAA competitions is eligible to propose a competition. Nations can also bid to host the Baptism of Rhythm or IMAA World Finals.
v) The circuit should include a Baptism of Rhythm competition, IMAA World Finals, and at least 1 other competition. The ideal number of competitions, including the BoR and WF, should be 6-9.
vi) At the end of the signup period, the Committee will vote to approve or deny each proposed competition, and to vote for the bidding hosts for BoR or WF (runoff voting).
vii) The president shall arrange the approved competitions in a set schedule. Only 1 competition shall be held per week, preferably on weekends. Break weeks are optional. Exact placement is arbitrary and at President's discretion, but the IMAA Finals must be the last competition of the circuit and the Baptism of Rhythm the one before.
viii) After this is all completed, the President shall start the IC circuit thread, using the IMAA nation as the OP. Information listing at least each Corps and Competition must be included, with other information nice but optional.
ix) At least 10 Corps should be signed up by the end of the signup period. If not, the period must be extended. New corps can join while the circuit is in session, although their chances of success are diminished.

b) Hosting
i) If a nation proposes or bids for a competition in the current circuit and are approved, they are responsible for hosting said competition(s).
ii) If a nation wishes for help learning to scorinate for a competition, they are free to ask the president or committee members (hopefully before their assigned competition date).
iii) A nation is required to post the competition results, fairly and accurately, on the IMAA thread, via whatever means they find easiest (although the scores must be visible on the thread, without using outside links).
vi) There should be 3 levels of scorinator (early, middle, late) for use throughout the circuit. Hosts must use the scorinator level assigned to them for their competition.
v) If the host of a competition does not post results or a note of delay within 24 hours of the assigned cutoff/posting time, it is the president's duty to scorinate in their absence.
vi) Competitions can be of any round length, but unless specified, they must consist of a Preliminary Round and a Final Round, which are scorinated at least 48 hours apart. Round specification should occur when proposing or bidding for said competition.
vii) World Finals must contain 3 rounds, a Preliminary, Elimination, and Final round. Elimination round must trim the amount of participating corps to the Top 10 of that round.
viii) In the absence of bids for the BoR or WF, the President shall complete scorination duties for them.

c) Results
i) After the Final results of each competition, corps will receive points based on placement using <system>.
ii) Hosts of subsequent competitions must use the current ranking points as dictated by <system>, as well as an RP bonus value, given to them by the president. These values combined must be used as starting values for the competition.
iii) Hosts may use their own sub-rankings using prelims results for use in finals, but this is not required, and will not be used in further circuit hosting.
iv) Exceptional records must be recorded by the President with appropriate detail.
v) Total score ties between corps will be settled by the following tiebreakers:
Highest General Effect (MGE+VGE) score.
Highest MGE score.
Higher current point value in <system>'s rankings.
Higher prelims score
Host's discretion.
vi) Caption ties are broken by whichever corps has a higher total score. If that's a tie, use above tiebreakers.
vii) At the end of the circuit, there should be at most 2 winners of the circuit: World Finals Champion and Circuit Powerhouse. These are determined by the first place corps in the final WF round, and the corps with the highest <system> point value at the end, respectively. Other accolades can be given at President's discretion (as they are also announced by the president at the end).

I may've missed some things, and we still need to iron out details of whatever the circuit <ranking> system is going to be, but here's a start. Thoughts? Anyone?

[Arcantova]

So, after forgetting about all this for 2 months (sorry and all), I decided I'll just get going and draft the constitution now. Drum corps season is now, and so it'd be nice to have the first "real" circuit going soon.

No problem. You've been hosting some stuff recently. Plus with the lack of response to this thread I could see why it would be hard to put it together. Where are all of those people that participated in the last circuit? Hello...anybody there?

ANYWAY...

Looks good. I still have some concern about people individually running comps, with the activity level in the previous circuit being a little...eh, but I see what you're going for and it does help get people involved and get that individuality of each competition in there.

I would suggest adding a part about how hosts are decided. You mentioned that nations can "propose a potential competition" but not who decides if that competition will be accepted. I assume it would be up to the President of the IMAA, but it probably needs to be in writing to be safe.

As for the rankings system, I think I have a couple ideas as far as points go, but what are your current thoughts about the rankings system? Which direction are you planning on going with it; Using points based on wins throughout the circuit or just points from the previous circuit?

[Drawkland]

Looks good. I still have some concern about people individually running comps, with the activity level in the previous circuit being a little...eh, but I see what you're going for and it does help get people involved and get that individuality of each competition in there.

I would suggest adding a part about how hosts are decided. You mentioned that nations can "propose a potential competition" but not who decides if that competition will be accepted. I assume it would be up to the President of the IMAA, but it probably needs to be in writing to be safe.

vi) At the end of the signup period, the Committee will vote to approve or deny each proposed competition, and to vote for the bidding hosts for BoR or WF (runoff voting).

I suppose this wasn't clear enough, but the council votes. Only the person who proposes a competition hosts it, I think that's covered later as well.

Also, I'm not too worried about hosting. I know there's about 3 people who are interested and there's a couple of people who participated last circuit who've hosted other things before.

As for the rankings system, I think I have a couple ideas as far as points go, but what are your current thoughts about the rankings system? Which direction are you planning on going with it; Using points based on wins throughout the circuit or just points from the previous circuit?

I want to track wins throughout the circuit, with a slight bonus given in subsequent circuits based on end result. The main goal of the ranking system would be having a fair way to give better faring corps a boost, without debalancing the system entirely.

[International Marching Arts Association]

Another thing: You may notice in this nation's various factbooks and OPs that there was a framework for specifically marching band or indoor ensemble competitions, but I've decided to drop it. It'd be easiest to focus on one thing only, and drum corps is the easiest to demonstrate.

[Drawkland]

So, with the drum corps season at a close (which seems inconvenient but that's when I started last year), I think it's a good time to revive this.

Even with the framework not totally ironed out and nothing officially set yet, I figure the best course of action is just to go out and do it and see how everything tumbles out. I'll write out an OP for the new edition (with its major changes) sometime tomorrow and Wednesday and open it once I'm finished. I have a basic idea for the ranks and how to arrange hosting and all the new things that need to be clarified.

Anywhere between 10 and 20 signups is what I'm expecting/hoping for. I'd hope to limit puppet corps or second corps, because it kinda clogs things and I doubt many people will RP one corps, much less 2.

So we'll see how the longer, circuit-based IMAA goes. See you all soon.

[Arcantova]

I hate that I stopped responding. I was just really hoping other people would give some input.

[Drawkland]

I hate that I stopped responding. I was just really hoping other people would give some input.

Whoops, sorry for not delivering the thread like I promised.

I took a second look at my schedule and decided I really won't have any time to host until late October most likely, so I think I will delay the signup thread until September ends. I'd like to host the debut competition for logistic and demonstration purposes, and so if signups begin in the beginning of October that'll put the planned start weekend in a perfect window for me to pull it off.

[The Serbian Empire]

I hate that I stopped responding. I was just really hoping other people would give some input.

Whoops, sorry for not delivering the thread like I promised.

I took a second look at my schedule and decided I really won't have any time to host until late October most likely, so I think I will delay the signup thread until September ends. I'd like to host the debut competition for logistic and demonstration purposes, and so if signups begin in the beginning of October that'll put the planned start weekend in a perfect window for me to pull it off.

I'll be back to resurface from my hiatus.

[Drawkland]

So this sort of fell by the wayside, and I apologize for that. But, now I come bearing great news. We have a scorinator now! Like an actual, ready-to-use scorinator.

With the help and permission of Spaam (many thanks to him), I modified his rugby scorinator in order to produce drum corps results. Okay, I know that sounds weird, but basically the framework was already there so it wasn't too much of an issue to change it to produce multiple point values. Anyway, if you want to check it out, I have a link to it here:

The Drum Corps Scorinator (v1)

So you may ask how all this works. Luckily, it's a hell of a lot simpler than the really annoying method I used that involved xkoranate, gymnastics, lots of copy/pasting, Google Sheets, BBCode martial arts, and a bit of a headache. This scorinator basically entirely eliminates the middleman, and tallies everything up for you. Now I'm gonna explain how it works.

Basically, when you first click on the link, you should be in view-only mode. This is intentional, so that the original version of the scorinator doesn't get tampered with. To use it, you have to click on the File tab, and (if you're logged in to your Google account), click "Make A Copy". You choose where to put the file in your Google Drive, and then you have a fully editable version of the sheet for your own use. Then you can get to work! If you don't have a Google account, you should probably get one. You can technically download it as an Excel document, but I'm not sure if the script or anything would work, and it's more convenient through Google Sheets anyway.

Once you have a copy on your drive that you can edit yourself, you're in business. Now go to the next tab titled "Teams." This is where all the Corps and their skill points are displayed. Each line obviously belongs to each Corps you have in your competition. The first column, "Rank," is their total bonus. This is the sum of rank, RP bonus, and whatever other bonus you want calculated for a Corps. Then the next 8 columns describe the skills of each Corps in the various scoring captions. If you're scoring a competition here, you can get these caption values from the signup posted by each Corps. Obviously if you're doing it for your own enjoyment just make the numbers up, but I use a scale of 1-10.

The captions there are listed in the order I intend to list them in for the signups, but in case they aren't, here's the order of the captions (if you can't discern from the acronyms): Musical General Effect, Visual General Effect, Visual Performance, Visual Analysis, Brass, Musical Analysis, Colorguard, Percussion. If you don't know the difference between the captions, that's not important for using the scorinator, really. That'll be explained in competition information posts and such but it's not important for scorination as long as you correspond to the values people posted.

Once your list of Corps and skill values are in shape, go down to the next tab, titled "Participants". Here, you can just list each Corps' name in each line. It'd probably be easiest to copy/paste the list from the Teams tab, but if you want to modify which order the Corps go in, either for IC purposes or for your own preference, this is where you'd do it. After that, you just go up to the menu bar at the top, go all the way to the right, and click the one that says "Scorinate". Then it brings up a menu that just says Scorinate. Obviously, clicking on that will scorinate each Corps on the Participants list and then paste their results on the Results list. More on that later.

The first time you try clicking Scorinate, Google Sheets will throw a fit at you. You have to press continue on the first window, select your account, then when it says "This app isn't verified!" go to the bottom, click "Advanced", then click "Go to Scorinator (unsafe)". Then the next window, click Allow. I know this looks super freaky and alarming, but that's just because the sheet uses an outside script (that Spaam wrote and I modified), which tells the sheet to go through the list, generate, and paste each Corps' results. Google does this so people don't accidentally give themselves viruses. This isn't a virus so you don't have to worry! You can even check the script yourself if you like (under Tools, Script Editor). Obviously I wouldn't suggest actually modifying it because you'll probably break the sheet. You can just look at it to ensure your own safety if you'd like.

So when you click Scorinate, it sends you to the Results sheet automatically, and you can see as each line of results are pasted on automatically. Once it reaches the end of the list it pops a little window to tell you it's done. Then you can just put a sum function on each row in the Total column, and your results are complete! You can then just select the whole table of results, and copy/paste them into a [pre] tag on the forum to have nicely formatted results, ready-made. Awesome, right? Once you're done with a round and you sure you have your results saved/posted somewhere else, you can go ahead and delete all the results for next time. You don't have to, of course, but then any subsequent times you scorinate it'll just add more and more rows to the bottom of the results sheet.

This is the one bug I'm unhappy with and will try to fix coming soon. I tried to keep the SUM function in the Total tab the whole time so you don't have to re-enter the function every time you got new results, but the script would see the function and decide the row wasn't empty so it would just start pasting the results at the bottom. Once I get back to this I'll try to edit the script to make this not happen anymore, but until then you gotta keep clearing and re-entering the SUM function whenever you get new results. At least that's not hard to do.

Finally, if you want, you can look at the Scorinator tab. It does everything automatically, so you don't need to do anything to it, really. You can tinker with it if you want to see how it works, but as a host you only need to know one thing. Towards the top there's a cell that says "Phase of Season?" and the cell next to it has a dropdown menu. The available phases are Early, Late, and World. I've made the scorinator so that the "later" in the season the scorinator is set for, the higher the scores will be. This makes it so we don't have some random 99.660 record score in the second competition of the season. It would break the immersion. So this helps you control how high the scores are. As a host in the circuit that I intend to run, which setting to put the sheet on will be clarified for you before the competition starts, although it should be clear what phase of the season it is.

Other than that, there's nothing really essential that needs to be said! Please get a copy for yourself and check out what it has to offer. Play with it. Scorinate a domestic drum corps competition or something, I dunno. Please tell me any suggestions you have, bugs you found, or questions you've come up with. I want to make sure this thing runs smoothly before we attempt a new circuit using this! Which, by the way, I intend to start up. Soon. For real this time. I promise.

Thanks for checking this out, and sorry again for the hiatus around here!

This is stuff that's not really necessary for normal usage of the scorinator. This is if you want to look at the scoring distributions and modify them, or something. Also disclaimer, it's been awhile since I did this part of the scorinator, as I had to wait for Spaam to come back from his RL hiatus in order to troubleshoot, so some of the mathematical definition here may be slightly incorrect. Bear with me.

Basically, the scorinator works off of a normal curve. The function there looks like this:

Code: Select all

=ROUND(NORMINV(POW(RAND(),(($A$7+A9)/2)), 16.864, 0.5488), 2)

Just as an example. That's the Early distribution for Music GE. Remember that the GE categories are scored out of 20 while the rest only out of 10. Anyway, this function is a lot of hubbub, but basically it takes a random decimal between 0 and 1, puts it to the power of a Corps' skill in that category divided by 2. This number is a decimal between 0 and 1. It fits this on a normal curve. The first value is the mean and the second value is the standard deviation. So it takes the decimal value, puts it on a normal curve, and then fits that curve to the numbers listed. The 2 is part of the ROUND function to make sure it doesn't have a gjfpillon decimals and therefore looks cleaner.

To get the two number values that the curve is fitted to (and is the only difference between the Early, Late, and World columns), I looked at all the Corps' overall scores from the 2017 season. I calculated around when scores started to become significantly larger, and put the cutoff there. I averaged the scores from each phase and divided by 10 to get an average score in each caption (and added 10 to that for the GE scores since they're worth double. I would've doubled them, but that would've made those scores oddly low. All in all, the scores in non-GE captions are equally close to 10 as the GE scores are close to 20. It makes more sense in my eyes). It took a few hours but I did get the scores all recorded and averaged for each phase. Obviously for the World phase I just tallied scores from the World Final prelims, semis, and finals.

All this to say, you can edit the two numbers in those formulas (the 16.864, 0.5488) for any mean/standard deviation you'd like. Obviously these scores are optimized to the DCI distributions as best as I could, but if you want to mess with them for your own personal use, like for a domestic circuit, feel free. This also applies if you want to apply this setup for a different sport or event that uses a similar scoring paradigm. Just let me know if/when you do and what the results are like. I'm curious and stuff.

Obviously, unless there's a clear reason to, these values will remain the same for any IMAA-sanctioned competition. If you've modified the distribution values for your own use, PLEASE CHANGE THEM BACK if you're going to score an official competition! Make another copy of the original to your drive if you have to.

Anyway, thanks for checking this out. Have fun tinkering, if you feel like it.

[Northwest Kalactin]

So this sort of fell by the wayside, and I apologize for that. But, now I come bearing great news. We have a scorinator now! Like an actual, ready-to-use scorinator.

With the help and permission of Spaam (many thanks to him), I modified his rugby scorinator in order to produce drum corps results. Okay, I know that sounds weird, but basically the framework was already there so it wasn't too much of an issue to change it to produce multiple point values. Anyway, if you want to check it out, I have a link to it here:

The Drum Corps Scorinator (v1)

So you may ask how all this works. Luckily, it's a hell of a lot simpler than the really annoying method I used that involved xkoranate, gymnastics, lots of copy/pasting, Google Sheets, BBCode martial arts, and a bit of a headache. This scorinator basically entirely eliminates the middleman, and tallies everything up for you. Now I'm gonna explain how it works.

Basically, when you first click on the link, you should be in view-only mode. This is intentional, so that the original version of the scorinator doesn't get tampered with. To use it, you have to click on the File tab, and (if you're logged in to your Google account), click "Make A Copy". You choose where to put the file in your Google Drive, and then you have a fully editable version of the sheet for your own use. Then you can get to work! If you don't have a Google account, you should probably get one. You can technically download it as an Excel document, but I'm not sure if the script or anything would work, and it's more convenient through Google Sheets anyway.

Once you have a copy on your drive that you can edit yourself, you're in business. Now go to the next tab titled "Teams." This is where all the Corps and their skill points are displayed. Each line obviously belongs to each Corps you have in your competition. The first column, "Rank," is their total bonus. This is the sum of rank, RP bonus, and whatever other bonus you want calculated for a Corps. Then the next 8 columns describe the skills of each Corps in the various scoring captions. If you're scoring a competition here, you can get these caption values from the signup posted by each Corps. Obviously if you're doing it for your own enjoyment just make the numbers up, but I use a scale of 1-10.

The captions there are listed in the order I intend to list them in for the signups, but in case they aren't, here's the order of the captions (if you can't discern from the acronyms): Musical General Effect, Visual General Effect, Visual Performance, Visual Analysis, Brass, Musical Analysis, Colorguard, Percussion. If you don't know the difference between the captions, that's not important for using the scorinator, really. That'll be explained in competition information posts and such but it's not important for scorination as long as you correspond to the values people posted.

Once your list of Corps and skill values are in shape, go down to the next tab, titled "Participants". Here, you can just list each Corps' name in each line. It'd probably be easiest to copy/paste the list from the Teams tab, but if you want to modify which order the Corps go in, either for IC purposes or for your own preference, this is where you'd do it. After that, you just go up to the menu bar at the top, go all the way to the right, and click the one that says "Scorinate". Then it brings up a menu that just says Scorinate. Obviously, clicking on that will scorinate each Corps on the Participants list and then paste their results on the Results list. More on that later.

The first time you try clicking Scorinate, Google Sheets will throw a fit at you. You have to press continue on the first window, select your account, then when it says "This app isn't verified!" go to the bottom, click "Advanced", then click "Go to Scorinator (unsafe)". Then the next window, click Allow. I know this looks super freaky and alarming, but that's just because the sheet uses an outside script (that Spaam wrote and I modified), which tells the sheet to go through the list, generate, and paste each Corps' results. Google does this so people don't accidentally give themselves viruses. This isn't a virus so you don't have to worry! You can even check the script yourself if you like (under Tools, Script Editor). Obviously I wouldn't suggest actually modifying it because you'll probably break the sheet. You can just look at it to ensure your own safety if you'd like.

So when you click Scorinate, it sends you to the Results sheet automatically, and you can see as each line of results are pasted on automatically. Once it reaches the end of the list it pops a little window to tell you it's done. Then you can just put a sum function on each row in the Total column, and your results are complete! You can then just select the whole table of results, and copy/paste them into a [pre] tag on the forum to have nicely formatted results, ready-made. Awesome, right? Once you're done with a round and you sure you have your results saved/posted somewhere else, you can go ahead and delete all the results for next time. You don't have to, of course, but then any subsequent times you scorinate it'll just add more and more rows to the bottom of the results sheet.

This is the one bug I'm unhappy with and will try to fix coming soon. I tried to keep the SUM function in the Total tab the whole time so you don't have to re-enter the function every time you got new results, but the script would see the function and decide the row wasn't empty so it would just start pasting the results at the bottom. Once I get back to this I'll try to edit the script to make this not happen anymore, but until then you gotta keep clearing and re-entering the SUM function whenever you get new results. At least that's not hard to do.

Finally, if you want, you can look at the Scorinator tab. It does everything automatically, so you don't need to do anything to it, really. You can tinker with it if you want to see how it works, but as a host you only need to know one thing. Towards the top there's a cell that says "Phase of Season?" and the cell next to it has a dropdown menu. The available phases are Early, Late, and World. I've made the scorinator so that the "later" in the season the scorinator is set for, the higher the scores will be. This makes it so we don't have some random 99.660 record score in the second competition of the season. It would break the immersion. So this helps you control how high the scores are. As a host in the circuit that I intend to run, which setting to put the sheet on will be clarified for you before the competition starts, although it should be clear what phase of the season it is.

Other than that, there's nothing really essential that needs to be said! Please get a copy for yourself and check out what it has to offer. Play with it. Scorinate a domestic drum corps competition or something, I dunno. Please tell me any suggestions you have, bugs you found, or questions you've come up with. I want to make sure this thing runs smoothly before we attempt a new circuit using this! Which, by the way, I intend to start up. Soon. For real this time. I promise.

Thanks for checking this out, and sorry again for the hiatus around here!

This is stuff that's not really necessary for normal usage of the scorinator. This is if you want to look at the scoring distributions and modify them, or something. Also disclaimer, it's been awhile since I did this part of the scorinator, as I had to wait for Spaam to come back from his RL hiatus in order to troubleshoot, so some of the mathematical definition here may be slightly incorrect. Bear with me.

Basically, the scorinator works off of a normal curve. The function there looks like this:

Code: Select all

=ROUND(NORMINV(POW(RAND(),(($A$7+A9)/2)), 16.864, 0.5488), 2)

Just as an example. That's the Early distribution for Music GE. Remember that the GE categories are scored out of 20 while the rest only out of 10. Anyway, this function is a lot of hubbub, but basically it takes a random decimal between 0 and 1, puts it to the power of a Corps' skill in that category divided by 2. This number is a decimal between 0 and 1. It fits this on a normal curve. The first value is the mean and the second value is the standard deviation. So it takes the decimal value, puts it on a normal curve, and then fits that curve to the numbers listed. The 2 is part of the ROUND function to make sure it doesn't have a gjfpillon decimals and therefore looks cleaner.

To get the two number values that the curve is fitted to (and is the only difference between the Early, Late, and World columns), I looked at all the Corps' overall scores from the 2017 season. I calculated around when scores started to become significantly larger, and put the cutoff there. I averaged the scores from each phase and divided by 10 to get an average score in each caption (and added 10 to that for the GE scores since they're worth double. I would've doubled them, but that would've made those scores oddly low. All in all, the scores in non-GE captions are equally close to 10 as the GE scores are close to 20. It makes more sense in my eyes). It took a few hours but I did get the scores all recorded and averaged for each phase. Obviously for the World phase I just tallied scores from the World Final prelims, semis, and finals.

All this to say, you can edit the two numbers in those formulas (the 16.864, 0.5488) for any mean/standard deviation you'd like. Obviously these scores are optimized to the DCI distributions as best as I could, but if you want to mess with them for your own personal use, like for a domestic circuit, feel free. This also applies if you want to apply this setup for a different sport or event that uses a similar scoring paradigm. Just let me know if/when you do and what the results are like. I'm curious and stuff.

Obviously, unless there's a clear reason to, these values will remain the same for any IMAA-sanctioned competition. If you've modified the distribution values for your own use, PLEASE CHANGE THEM BACK if you're going to score an official competition! Make another copy of the original to your drive if you have to.

Anyway, thanks for checking this out. Have fun tinkering, if you feel like it.

Will there be a Marching Arts tournament because if this?

[Drawkland]

Will there be a Marching Arts tournament because if this?

My intentions in designing this scorinator was so that we could have a Drum Corps season circuit competition which would be user-friendly and more accessible to nations who haven't done drum corps hosting before.

This has been repeated by me several times on the thread already, but I'll say it again. If we do this thing I want it to match the sort of system that the WGPC uses, with competitions happening every weekend for a month or two, all held on the same thread. Then it'd conclude in a final World Championship to decide the winner of the season (which is where it departs from the WGPC design but still).

[International Marching Arts Association]

Revived the admin nation? Check.

Made a snazzy new logo? Check.

Have a new and improved scorinator? Check.

Designed framework for a better circuit system? Check.

Is it Drum Corps season yet? ... Still waiting on that one.

Big things are happening everyone. I'm gonna be waiting for the opportune moment to do it, but just know that I have the framework written up for a signup thread and I will post it at will once the time comes. Based on how the NS Sports calendar is turning out, hopefully we'll see the World Cup, NSCAA, and various other major tournaments finishing around mid-may, right around when the drum corps season kicks off! Theoretically then interest will be high and we can get things rolling then. More details to come when the time approaches closer.

Also, I've decided to scrap the whole president and constitution. Not to sound all dictatory, but I don't think anybody else is going to care enough about this to operate as I will. Plus, things like the WGPC just operate under one guy rather than a council or anything and it seems to roll quite swimmingly. So unless sufficient demand occurs for a president and committee and everything, I'll just conduct all this business unilaterally. Remove bottlenecks, etc.

Really excited people. Hoping to get more activity this time

[User Control Panel (Ancient)]

Revived the admin nation? Check.

Made a snazzy new logo? Check.

Have a new and improved scorinator? Check.

Designed framework for a better circuit system? Check.

Is it Drum Corps season yet? ... Still waiting on that one.

Big things are happening everyone. I'm gonna be waiting for the opportune moment to do it, but just know that I have the framework written up for a signup thread and I will post it at will once the time comes. Based on how the NS Sports calendar is turning out, hopefully we'll see the World Cup, NSCAA, and various other major tournaments finishing around mid-may, right around when the drum corps season kicks off! Theoretically then interest will be high and we can get things rolling then. More details to come when the time approaches closer.

Also, I've decided to scrap the whole president and constitution. Not to sound all dictatory, but I don't think anybody else is going to care enough about this to operate as I will. Plus, things like the WGPC just operate under one guy rather than a council or anything and it seems to roll quite swimmingly. So unless sufficient demand occurs for a president and committee and everything, I'll just conduct all this business unilaterally. Remove bottlenecks, etc.

Really excited people. Hoping to get more activity this time

We and the rest of the YMNS are very excited for next season. Expect between six and ten new nations participating.

[International Marching Arts Association]

Alright! I just kinda realized that I never announced this here, which is kinda a major thing.

Signups are now open!! The first official IMAA circuit is set to begin sometime in the next few weeks, hopefully. If you're interested, please follow THIS LINK to go to the signup thread. Just follow the instructions there under the "How to Sign Up" section and bam, you're done! The process is similar to what it was in the past competitions but not the same.

Everything else is optional, but you should definitely give them a read if you want to know everything that's going on! If you're interested in IC'ly or OOC'ly hosting a competition in the circuit, then there's a separate signup form for that. All the information regarding that should be in the post, but as always, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask either on that thread or this one (or even by TG).

That's all folks! Looking to get at least 10 Corps signed up (without resorting to multiple per nation), and we're halfway there already! Still not sure how many competitions I want to have for the whole circuit, but if there ends up being a whole lot of competition hosting requests then it may have to shift to a first-come, first-served basis. I don't anticipate that happening at all, but better safe than sorry.

Hope to see you all out on the fields!

-Drawk

[Ethane]

Was just thinking about this and wondering when it'd pop up again.

I'll probably sign up.

[Drawkland]

Hey guys! Looks like we're about halfway now on signups, we're sitting at 6 and I'm aiming for a solid 12-15 total by the time we start. Competition-wise the same can be said, we have 5 competitions slotted now that doesn't include the World Championships. 10 I think would make for a clean circuit, but ultimately anything we can get would be nice.

Just a reminder to all the people who participated last time around, like 2 years ago, that this is definitely happening, so it would be nice to see all of you return!

[International Marching Arts Association]

A reminder that we're currently sitting at 6 corps ... about 4 away from the nearest workable number, which is 10. If you're considering signing up, don't hesitate to do so!