THIS IS A POWER RANKING GAME. The albums are arranged in the poll from best to worst, with the top seeded album being the top ranked album. I seeded the albums based on two facts: how many lists it appeared on, and my general understanding of this board's tastes after being here for 15 years. This way we don't have to spend multiple rounds moving an album like Brave New World to the top, it's already there unless voters decide to knock it off the top spot.
Essential Questions:
How do you knock albums off the top spot? If you feel like an album is ranked too low, vote for that album. Any album that receives a significant plurality of votes (this number will be fluid and based on participation) will move up a slot. If you like the list as is, vote for the top album.
How often does this update? I will look at the numbers roughly every 24 hours and move albums accordingly. You can vote for as many albums as you want and you can vote whenever the poll resets. After a week, I will close the poll and we will move on to the next year. This will take us to mid December with the finals wrapping up right at the new year.
How were albums selected? I would say 95% of the albums that will appear in this game were sourced from Maidenfans lists. Every album that was submitted will appear in the game. For years that have a lot of duplicates (2000 being one), I filled in the list with other acclaimed albums. Many years surprisingly had close to all unique albums, with 2014, 2020, and 2023 having only one duplicate each. No year featured an entirely unique list of albums. No Maidenfans nominated albums were seeded lower than an album I pulled from an outside source.
Do I need to listen to every album here? Not necessarily, but I would highly encourage it! You have a week to vote and the voting will update every day (so you can vote every day or you can vote once a week or whatever you want). Everybody has unlimited votes. I think you will get more out of this game if you listen to the albums you're not familiar with and see if you can find any new favorites.
My favorite album isn't here! You had 7 months to send me a list!!!
I want to thank everybody who participated. I received 17 lists and 250+ albums! Most years had quite a variety of material and it made me appreciate the diversity of taste around here. I'm really excited to dig into each list I got and I am going to do my best to listen to every album. With that being said, let's get started with...
YEAR MMIV (2004)
This is a smaller slate than normal, usually I try to fill in with non-user nominated albums but there wasn't a lot that stuck out to me as essential inclusions, so I think it will be interesting to see how some of these nominated albums fare against each other. It makes sense that this is a comparatively underwhelming year, considering how prolific the Maidenfans favorites were the first few years of the decade. Nightwish is coming in as a juggernaut and this one feels like a 2000-esque foregone conclusion. I will humbly suggest, however, that it is not the album that should win. For me, that album is The Human Equation, which is a modern masterpiece of a rock opera. Megadeth also comes in with a pretty solid return to form after a pretty big fall from grace in the late 90s early 00s. I'm keeping an eye on the bottom three seeds, non-nominated albums that I think are fairy respected among fans. Leviathan in particular had a pretty major nostalgia tour associated with it last year. I'm also curious about Alter Bridge and Motorhead. Lots of decent albums here but I think this one is Nightwish's to lose. We'll see!
Essential Questions:
How do you knock albums off the top spot? If you feel like an album is ranked too low, vote for that album. Any album that receives a significant plurality of votes (this number will be fluid and based on participation) will move up a slot. If you like the list as is, vote for the top album.
How often does this update? I will look at the numbers roughly every 24 hours and move albums accordingly. You can vote for as many albums as you want and you can vote whenever the poll resets. After a week, I will close the poll and we will move on to the next year. This will take us to mid December with the finals wrapping up right at the new year.
How were albums selected? I would say 95% of the albums that will appear in this game were sourced from Maidenfans lists. Every album that was submitted will appear in the game. For years that have a lot of duplicates (2000 being one), I filled in the list with other acclaimed albums. Many years surprisingly had close to all unique albums, with 2014, 2020, and 2023 having only one duplicate each. No year featured an entirely unique list of albums. No Maidenfans nominated albums were seeded lower than an album I pulled from an outside source.
Do I need to listen to every album here? Not necessarily, but I would highly encourage it! You have a week to vote and the voting will update every day (so you can vote every day or you can vote once a week or whatever you want). Everybody has unlimited votes. I think you will get more out of this game if you listen to the albums you're not familiar with and see if you can find any new favorites.
My favorite album isn't here! You had 7 months to send me a list!!!
I want to thank everybody who participated. I received 17 lists and 250+ albums! Most years had quite a variety of material and it made me appreciate the diversity of taste around here. I'm really excited to dig into each list I got and I am going to do my best to listen to every album. With that being said, let's get started with...
YEAR MMIV (2004)
This is a smaller slate than normal, usually I try to fill in with non-user nominated albums but there wasn't a lot that stuck out to me as essential inclusions, so I think it will be interesting to see how some of these nominated albums fare against each other. It makes sense that this is a comparatively underwhelming year, considering how prolific the Maidenfans favorites were the first few years of the decade. Nightwish is coming in as a juggernaut and this one feels like a 2000-esque foregone conclusion. I will humbly suggest, however, that it is not the album that should win. For me, that album is The Human Equation, which is a modern masterpiece of a rock opera. Megadeth also comes in with a pretty solid return to form after a pretty big fall from grace in the late 90s early 00s. I'm keeping an eye on the bottom three seeds, non-nominated albums that I think are fairy respected among fans. Leviathan in particular had a pretty major nostalgia tour associated with it last year. I'm also curious about Alter Bridge and Motorhead. Lots of decent albums here but I think this one is Nightwish's to lose. We'll see!
