We told you that we had something planned, and here are a few of them!

If you haven’t noticed already, there is an addition of the ‘Community‘ page on the top navigation bar. A forum (chromatiqa/f) is set up! Feel free to sign up – eventually, many announcements, charting matters such as song requests and approvals, will be moved to the forums.

Also you will see a small bit about donations. Chromatiqa is currently running off our personal expenses. If you would like to help support Chromatiqa, you can make a cash donation through Paypal; if you want to donate prizes or other goods, please contact us at admin(at)chromatiqa(dot)org. We greatly appreciate any donation of any size. By donating, you can help keep Chromatiqa online and running and help us fund larger prizes for our contests. We will also send to any donor a gratuitous amount of appreciation and a warm fuzzy feeling in your heart, shipping and handling included. :)

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY:

Welcome to the first Notedrop charting contest!

(The contest will be held in the forums – check there for updates!)

The song is ESTi – Oblivion. You can download its song files at the topic.

Rules

1. Each user may submit ONE entry only.
2. An entry consists of a set of three or more charts for the song. Entering a large amount of charts will NOT increase your chances of winning!
3. At least one of these charts must be a 4K NM or 6K NM difficulty.
4. A chartlist.txt file containing the corresponding entry for your charts must also be submitted along with your charts.
5. Do not edit the song files. Especially, do not edit the offset in the song metadata file; if you feel the offset for the song is incorrect, adjust your global latency. Offset has a tendency to vary between computers.
6. The songs and their respective song files will be released on Monday 23rd May at 1200 hours PDT (GMT-7).
7. The contest closes at Wednesday 15th June 0000 hours (GMT -7). No entries will be accepted after this time.

Submitting your Charts

1. Compress your charts and chartlist.txt, containing the corresponding entry for your chart entries only, into a file named NDChartContest1.zip or NDChartContest1.rar. If you don’t know how to do this, ask us. Submit your charts as an attachment to a reply in the thread.
2. SUBMISSIONS ARE FINAL. You may not make multiple submissions. You may not edit a submission after it is submitted.

Judging

Charts will be scored based on the following criteria:

A. TECHNICAL CORRECTNESS of Charts. Correctly discerning rhythms from the music, making good judgments on which rhythms/instruments to chart to, not assigning more than one note per sound in the music, remembering to place gold notes, properly assigning chart difficulties, etc. are very important. “How to Chart a Good Chart” in the Charting for Notedrop page offers some guidelines on what makes a proper chart proper.
B. CREATIVITY of Charts. A creative chart has unique patterns, is not repetitive, and surprises players by charting to less-than-obvious instruments and sounds.
C. ENJOYABILITY of Charts. A enjoyable chart doesn’t confuse or frustrate the player unnecessarily, contains challenging but not unfair passages based on the difficulty, and most importantly is just plain fun. Technically correct and creative charts tend to be more enjoyable.

Each criteria receives a score between 0 to 10 (10 is the best) from each judge. The score for each criteria for each judge is summed together for a total score out of 90. A score does not necessarily have to be an integer.

The judges are Bitzeralisis, thepianistalex, and akaru. Judges (apart from Bitzeralisis) are not allowed to discuss their individual score judgments with each other (they will judge blindly) before they all send their scores to Bitzeralisis, who will composite the scores with his own for a submission’s total score.

Judges may not participate in the contest.

Prizes

1st Place: $10 via PayPal and addition of charts to the online chartlist. The highest-scoring charter must have a score of at least 50 to be eligible for this prize. In the case of a tie, Bitzeralisis will decide the winning charter.

Note that if you do not have / cannot access a PayPal account, we will work out an equivalent prize afterwards.