MMA Best of Year 2017 Vote Will Open Jan 1st

A formal voting thread will open on December 31st but in the meantime you can read this year's rules/guidelines in advance below and make use of this thread to ask any questions before the event starts.

I suggested the idea to re-balance the result a bit. I know I wasn't the only one surprised by such a largely hated album being voted in at number three on account of a few people loving it. That's not representative of the best albums of the year if everyone else either hates it or is just totally meh about it.

But if we can get more voters through the door it should balance out anyway. In theory.

I´m with Travis here. I don´t support the idea of voting for the worst albums of the year. A lot of negativity and hostility among members could spawn from that, and that´s one thing MMA don´t need, given the relatively low membership we already have. We don´t want any more people leaving. We need as many people as possible on this site celebrating what a great genre of music heavy metal is

Another change that's happening this year is that Metal Related tagged albums are being allowed back in (not Non-Metal). Disallowing MR last year almost invalidated the result when releases had to be moved after the event had taken place. It's safer this year to just allow them. I'll be expecting all voters to use their discretion on what Metal Related tagged albums really deserve to be voted for. 

I really dislike the idea of a worst albums vote, personally. The end of the year vote should be a celebration of the best (or at least people's favorite) albums from the year, so trying to throw negativity into it is a bad thing, imo, not to mention the potential back and forth we could get if people get upset over their favorite's being denied due to too many negative votes. The thing is, even doing a best of vote people are only going to be able to vote on album they've actually heard, and so it's possible for every worthy album to possibly get the amount of attention it deserves, and then when you throw in a worst of vote, it's even less likely people will have heard albums that are truly terrible enough to deserve that distinction, and so it'll either turn into a matter of downvoting the most popular albums or downvoting albums that aren't someone's personal favorite, regardless of if they've heard them or not.

I don't think anyone here who knows you would accuse you of that.

I'm not thinking submitting an as long list for worst album. Maybe 5 per person with each getting an equal deduction of a set amount of points. Let's say 10.

I meant more that it didn't seem like many people voted. Which I guess is the same thing. A liked but not loved album may feature in more lists low down and not chart the top 50 but an album a couple of people love will get a massive score boost, while the people who hate it simply won't vote for it, and as such can't do a damn thing about it.

But thinking on it, perhaps we can. Maybe as well as posting a best of list we can also post a (probably shorter) worst of list where the albums voted for get negative points which are then taken off the result from the best of lists?

Unitron wrote: TheHeavyMetalCat wrote: I hope that we get more voters this year now that the door is open. Last year seemed a bit poor to me. What, you didn't like that an album with an average rating of 2.31 at the time that was hated by almost everyone on the site was #3?

Great idea to open it up to everyone.

It's getting close to that time of the year already - The MMA Collabs Best of Year vote. Wait! What's that strike-through for? That's right, we'll be opening up our best of year vote to anyone who wants to take part this year, so all from admins to brand new members will be welcome to take part.