Hey,

I find you're site extremely helpful and am glad it exists.

But for me to make new finds here isn't as easy as it could be. The scores you give are way too high. Take for example Megadeth, let's say I'm new to the band and I wanna know which album I should start with. I can't just buy all of them right away or even three. I need to buy ONE, then listen to it, think what I like about it then proceed to the next record.

These are the averages for Megadeth albums:

1. Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? 93%
2. Rust in Peace 89%
3. Killing Is My Business...and Business Is Good! 87%
3. So Far, So Good...So What! 87%
5. Endgame 84%
5. That One Night: Live in Buenos Aires 84%
7. Rude Awakening 83%
7. Countdown to Extinction 83%
9. Youthanasia 82%
10. The System Has Failed 72%
11. United Abomination 70%
12. The World Needs a Hero 66%
13. Cryptic Writings 65%
14. Risk 50%

It doesn't look all that bad actually. (Correct me if I'm wrong but) Isn't most of the slower, more radio friendly, stuff on Youthanasia and Countdown? They're quality albums too. I think that after the two best ranked albums, you should listen to either Countdown or Youthanasia. To see if you like it when Dave slows down a bit.

Another thing, the actual scores. 7 albums are between 82-87. If I take into account the "probability of error"(+-5), they're all basically the same. I really don't know where to go.

Suggestion: Why can't you make all the scores about the band only. Looking at the scores I can clearly see you thinking "Well, Risk is easily the worst Megadeth album but it is better than most of todays crap." Then it has a 50% rating. If it had a rating of, say, 20% it would still be clearly the worst Megadeth album. Then you could give Cryptic Writing a 30% and so on. You would actually be using the full scope of the 0-100% system.

Am I making any sense?

No.

The ratings are averages of user-submitted review ratings, and we are not going to tweak them in any way. If you wish rate Risk at 20%, it would suddenly have a worse rating than most of the bedroom black metal demos here, and then you'd complain about that.

The rating system will stay the way it is. Read the reviews, don' settle for browsing the scores. You'll find the actual opinions there, not just juggling of subjective numbers.

And yes, the full 0-100% range is in use here, if you know where to look.

Tätä mä just meinasin. This is what I meant. To me that doesn't matter. It is impossible(perhaps pointless) to compare albums in the 10%-50% area. They're bad, almost not worth listening to unless you're a fan. Is Sepultura's "Roots" better than "Risk"? Who cares? More important would be that they're clearly lower than other albums by the band, so someone who's new to the band knows to avoid them.

Then I suggest you take it up with every single person who wrote a review for any of the aforementioned albums, and ask them to kindly reconsider their scores so that they can fit a more, in your opinion, appropriate score.

That's about the only way it'll be done.

it is hard to really get to the core of an objective opinion. The problem with this site might be the existence of too many 'inexperienced' listener -- with a too small background on metal --, which results in too high scores and insufficient criticism; see Bürzüm for instance.

The only way to deal with this is a large amount of reviewers, whose work is to balance the whole mess out a bit. In some way accuracy is lost in this process, but there is no way to deal with this properly.

Weighing reviews is very tricky and fan boys are the factor that would prove to be an unbalancing element here.

it is an endless topic ... discussed to death around here.

In fact you should not look at average scores if you want to find the good album of any band because fan boys will always give high scores. I will tell you what I do and that actually work fine till now.
First you need to click on [More stats] on metal-archives main page.
Second you go take a look at the Top 25 - members in written reviews. Those members theoretically should at least have more experience then the other fan boys reviewers.
Third you will need to read some reviews for those members about albums that you already own so you could compare their point of view with yours.
Fourth you could look at reviews written by moderators/high scores users because theoretically those members too have more experience then the other fans reviewers.

Thanks for that. What I would really need is for someone to have reviewed about three albums that I know well from the same band. Then I could find myself agreeing/disagreeing with the reviewer. Just saying that album x has bad riffs doesn't mean anything but if the same guy/girl says album y has better riffs and album z has the best riffs then I know what to disagree/agree with.


That almost never happens, though. Probably because I really am a "nu-metal newbie" or whatever, my metal knowledge isn't all that.

Scores are arbitrary, words say much more - read the opinions, and if you have something to say that isn't represented, then write a review and post it.
Most major releases and pretty much any release with a lot of reviews will have at least one written by someone who has written a lot of reviews, after a while reading the site you will notice the notable/prolific reviewers, and you will know which reviews to read if you don't want to read them all.

Write appropriate reviews and attempt to get them accepted if you care so much.

Yeah, but make sure the score reflects your actual opinion of the album. Don't just give Risk a 0% because you want to lower its overall score. That sort of thing is frowned upon here.

Or anywhere, really. It's kind of a dick thing to do in general. And the reviews represent people's tastes. If they happen to think Risk is a slab of pure godliness, and the best album ever recorded, they're going to rate it high. Granted, they'll be in the minority, but they're rating it on how they feel about it, not how people say they should.

That's about the only sensible way to go about, if you're going to let yourself be influenced by reviews. It took me a while to build up a solid base of reviewers whose opinion i trust (although, sometimes i disagree with them), but it was far easier to pick out gems from the mud, once the foundation was laid.

The only headache i have is when two or more reviewers i trust give polarized opinions about a release. Who do i trust moooooooreeeeeee?

yourself, obviously

But seriously, if two of your fave reviewers give polarized opinions you can be certain the album does in fact have impact in one way or another.
And, it's better to read about albums which are both worshipped as well as detested than albums which everyone thinks are 'okay'....

I've noticed that people on this site will either give an album too high of a rating or too low, depending on the type of metal they listen to. The pickle i am in is reading reviews that are totally biased because they show no appreciation for bands that have talent while they turn around and praise black metal and metalcore/mallcore albums. Really? is wankery even a word we should be using to review an album?

Does anyone else notice this problem?

What problem? You might as well have written:

Artist: The Arcane Order
Rating: 100%
Reasoning: Best metalcore

Artist: Machinae Supremacy
Rating: 100%
Reasoning: Unique

Not understandable;

Artist: Spirit Caravan
Rating:100%
Reasoning: Too stoner rockish

Artist:Lykathea Aflame
Rating: 100%
Reasoning: Technical wankery for people who think technicality is everything/who the hell are they?

Personally, I think the best thing to do would be to read some reviews on Metal Archives and THEN listen to some of the songs online. If you enjoy a part of the album, chances are you'll enjoy the rest of it.

The IMDB site has a really good voting system, and it's quite complicated as well. That means, if 10 people give a movie a 9 (out of 10) the score isn't a 9, simply because only a few people who enjoy the movie might have voted. Only when shitloads of people vote things are going to be the average of their votes. I think for most of the movies they really give a decent verdict about the quality of the movie. I don't know if it could work the same for music and everybody could vote here on albums. But now a lot of albums get high ratings because only 1 or 2 people take the time to write a review about them, and most of the time you only write a review of stuff that you think is good. If you could simply vote then the scores are a more precise indication of what you can expect instead of only be able to read 1 review which is good. And this also solves the 'problem' that still the majority of albums have no reviews at all. A user rating would help here.

That's fascinating, but the reality is that there is no problem with the scores on MA as they exist now, nor with the formula that caculates them. The only problem is some touchy users who obsess over something so trivial.

But this would be something outside the review stuff or? I doubt that a system similar to the IMDB one would work with the reviews, as there are generally not enough reviews per release.

Yeah you're right about the reviews, but the initial poster talks about he cant decide what is a good release from a certain band as from the reviews most scores are the same (mostly high). So apart from reviewing albums, there can be a seperate voting system. At IMDB you can also find reviews on the movies, AND you have the votes from the users.

Advantage of the voting system is that you can easily vote for an album and that also more average albums get attention. As I said before, a lot of reviewers only review stuff that's good in their opinion (for most of the not so known bands, I know that an Iron Maiden album will get reviewed no matter if its good or not), but if something's average you can easily leave a vote and go on, not having to put a lot of time and effort writing a review.

So you want create an additional populist rating system? Horrible, horrible idea.

I usually follow a certain reviewer. Take albums that you really like and study reviewers that also rated that album high. If you find that you have similar taste (at least in one subgenre) than you can check out other bands that the reviewer rated highly.

More work (what people are most trying to avoid it seems) but the fruits of this effort are much more valuable than whatever meaningful info you can glean from an egalitarian voting system.

yes i think the scores are way too high.

elaborate

You want to create a vote based rating system, which everyone can participate in as easilly as pressing a button. That's as populist as you can possibly get.

elaborate =//= explain

He obviously meant that he didn't understand my comment, and needed explanation. He probobly used the word "elaborate" because he heard Picard use it on Star Trek.

No, I didn't mean why it is a populist thing to do, I was hoping you could work out the idea of why it is horrible

The fact that it is populist, rather than merit based like the review system, is what makes it terrible.

That is not an argument but a surmise unless you can back your statement up with facts.

There are ways with which you can counter the unbalance created by the rush of fanboys to their beloved albums; additional factors like amount of reviews, time passed since the account has been created, age etc. can meliorate inaccuracies in the ratings. It is not be an easy thing to do, but would be interesting nonetheless.

Sounds like a lot of thought, hassle and coding to impliment an entirely useless feature.

Yet the mods will most likely do exactly that, accept or reject a review depending on whether in their view the average score needs to be raised or lowered.

OK, which review of yours have we rejected?

Seriously, I haven't seen anything like that happening in a few years, and even that case involved an ex-mod nuking three or four "unworthy" reviews. If someone does that, the moderator will end up having his status as a staff member reconsidered. I've approved reviews that have been both laughably fanboyish on crappy albums and repugnantly and obviously aimed at gaining some obscure metal scene points by bashing some semi-famous and attempting to look like someone who knows the true underground, etc. The same goes for most of my personal favourite bands.

That is a serious and really disturbing accusation you casually set against us. I can personally vouch for the ethics of most staff members. I'd reconsider that sentence right now, dude.

How does that work, Expedience? I'd wager the mods haven't even HEARD 80 or 90% of what is being put into the queue; so how exactly would they accept or reject them based on personal opinions about the score? Pfft; what a load.

I agree the userbase has a tendency to over worship a lot of albums and also overly trash a lot. There is a tendency of people to review albums they either love or hate over albums they think are just good or ok. There is also a tendency of people to reiew albums they have only just begun listening to and formed opinions about. Often their opinions will change over time and they won't bother rewriting their review. It's like when you get a new toy for Christmas and can do nothing but talk about it for a few weeks and then after that you forget about it and only occasionally take it out to play with. Same principle really. Fortunately however with a lot of the albums from bands like Megadeth you will find a wide range of reviews so select the few reviews you want to read and go with that or find particular reviewers who share similar tastes to you and read through their reviews and you may discover new albums you enjoy that way. Album reviews have always been about the content of the review and not the score. This has had to continuously be stressed to people since the opening of this site.

This is true but perfectly understandable; why choose an average cd by a mediocre band to review when can express your opinion on your favourites instead? Lot easier too. This is inevitable and will not change, but is something to bear in mind when reading very high or very low rated reviews. Call it an inherent flaw if you want, but as there appears to be no reasonable alternative, there is no point whining about it- not directed at you, vis.

This is pretty much how I feel. I find it more difficult to review something which is mediocre, or piss-poor than I do something I truly enjoy listening to. Therefore I tend to review things I like more often than not.

Funnily enough, I received some "constructive criticism" tonight from one guy on Last FM. He told me, "You give too many 100's". As far as I remember, in 757 reviews, I've given 4. I didn't think that was too many, but it turns out I'm wrong.

Personally I find reviewing average releases easier than albums or love or hate, because for me it requires much more effort to describe strong emotions than describing just general content.

Another reason for which we review the albums that we like the most is that those albums are invariably the ones we listen to the most, resulting in them being the ones we're most familiar with. Being familiar with an album is my number one criteria when I ask myself what I want to review.