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...
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 MMXII
2012 is a super interestng year to me with several albums that I am going to be curious about the results for. In our top seed, Sabaton has been a bit of a juggernaut but they actually haven't won one of these games yet. Carolous Rex is potentially their last real shot at topping a list and I will be curious if it happens. It's going to be a challenge though because we have some other things at play here, including a very highly acclaimed Rush album. While Rush's status as a metal band is debatable, it is a heavier album and it doesn't really matter since it's in the game and people will vote for it whether it's metal or not. Additionally, this will be the first test to see if current events influence these things at all, as Rush fans have been awakened this week.
The other interesting piece is we have a couple solo projects from Maiden members not named Bruce Dickinson or Blaze Bayley. Now Maiden projects and Maiden side projects have generally done very well in these games, as expected, but the Steve Harris and Adrian Smith projects had mixed receptions even at the time on this forum and I feel British Lion in particular hasn't exactly been met with the acclaim you would expect for a solo album by the Maiden boss. Still, as I said, Maiden projects have generally done very well on here and so far they have all landed somewhere in the middle to upper tier. It will be interesting to see if this holds especially with British Lion starting at the bottom seed. I could easily see it staying there too.
There is a lot of good mid level material. My favorite album from this year is Urd, just a really fantastic melodic folk metal project that I think would appeal to a lot of people here particularly those who fear growls. Gojira has had mixed results here but it's a popular album that I expect will jump up a bit. Cattle Decapitation is an extreme metal juggernaut but maybe not for this crowd. On the other hand, The Sword is safer, more accessible, and blander but sometimes that is exactly the sort of thing that is advantaged in a crowd sourced project. Primal Fear starts at a high seed, genuinely don't know what to expect there. Devin Townsend has done poorly in this game so far, Epicloud is a very accessible album but I think Dev missed his chance at this point.
Somebody nominated Van Halen, I like the album (I actually think this is how reunion albums should be made, but that's a topic for a different day) but on this forum I think you're basically feeding it to the lions.
