Battle of the Albums (beta)

[MuffinMcFluffin]

ENTER SPREADSHEET HERE
(give it about seven seconds to let it load)

Please keep contributing to the Battle of the Track Numbers threads. You have a tangible number of first place votes there, it's right on the site, and it's very quick to do.

I made a spreadsheet in response to the idea that no other tracks are ranked other than the first place ones, plus we aren't accounting for second, third, fourth fifth, and sixth place votes when we do this voting. On top of that, I wanted to try and sort/rank albums on a scoring system, accumulated by everybody. Note that you are still ranking tracks per number on this spreadsheet.

Find the first blank table, and use the drop-down tabs to enter a 1-6 (1 being best, 6 being worst) per track, per track number. Please try and avoid ties, but if you do make sure to skip a number (in other words, 1-2-2-4-5-6 instead of 1-2-2-3-4-5). Your album ranking values will not pop up until you've filled out all of your rankings, save a couple of tracks (I'll get to that in a bit).

Scoring isn't perfectly evenly spaced; higher ranked songs are slightly credited more than just "one point difference" (I won't give the exact formula, but that's why this is in beta). I did account for the fact that every album has a different number of songs, and balanced the extra tracks against each other in a fair way. There shouldn't be any injustice to the fact that Never Born to Follow simply "has to be ranked #1." Nevertheless, if you don't mark it, your album rankings will not appear.

On the far right of your rankings are three more drop-down boxes: you get to decide whether or not you want to include One Life with WTS rankings, as well as Breathe in ODR vs. TLH, and Cruel Sun & Solace in ODR. One Life is here because a lot of people (including myself) don't really have the same criteria to measure that track against others, and appropriately rank it #6 automatically; Breathe is a side-B track for ODR, but first appeared on TLH, so that is up to you on where you think it belongs; Cruel Sun & Solace never actually appeared in any incarnation of ODR, and therefore is also optional but if you include one then you must include the other. Note that these songs will still be ranked with other songs of that track number.

I hope a lot of you guys take the time to fill out your rankings! Maybe it'll make more sense to do it after you've done the Battle of the Track Numbers votes for all 17 sets first, though. I'd also like for you to leave any comments/suggestions that you may have, and report any bugs that you may notice (I haven't yet found a streamlined way to settle score ties on the leaderboard, for example).

[TheEndisHere]

I did my and was surprised by how it calculated my rankings. I always thought that it would match my tiers (1- Fortress and Blackbird, 2- AB3 and WTS 3- TLH and ODR). When I finished my rankings, I was surprised to see that AB3 ranked at my #2 above Blackbird and below Fortress.

[MuffinMcFluffin]

I did my and was surprised by how it calculated my rankings. I always thought that it would match my tiers (1- Fortress and Blackbird, 2- AB3 and WTS 3- TLH and ODR). When I finished my rankings, I was surprised to see that AB3 ranked at my #2 above Blackbird and below Fortress.

Yup, totally why it's in beta stages hahaha.

In case your curious though, BB and AB III were neck-and-neck. As your scores were relatively adjusted overall, your votes put Fortress takes at 10.00 (everybody's top does) while AB III has 9.27 and BB has 9.26. In other words, literally a single minor, minor vote swing would change those two, hah.

[VigilantSteve]

I did my and was surprised by how it calculated my rankings. I always thought that it would match my tiers (1- Fortress and Blackbird, 2- AB3 and WTS 3- TLH and ODR). When I finished my rankings, I was surprised to see that AB3 ranked at my #2 above Blackbird and below Fortress.

I'm equally surprised that Walk The Sky is ranking as my #2 above Blackbird and below Fortress. Definitely wasn't expecting that. I think ultimately the only way for it to truly reflect our overall album rankings would be for it to also take into consideration the order we would rank each of the songs per album (i.e. for Walk The Sky - Clear Horizon being my #1, Forever Falling being my #2, etc.). I can't imagine the nightmare in trying to add that into the calculation.

This is really damn cool though MuffinMcFluffin...thanks for putting this together.

[MuffinMcFluffin]

I did my and was surprised by how it calculated my rankings. I always thought that it would match my tiers (1- Fortress and Blackbird, 2- AB3 and WTS 3- TLH and ODR). When I finished my rankings, I was surprised to see that AB3 ranked at my #2 above Blackbird and below Fortress.

I'm equally surprised that Walk The Sky is ranking as my #2 above Blackbird and below Fortress. Definitely wasn't expecting that. I think ultimately the only way for it to truly reflect our overall album rankings would be for it to also take into consideration the order we would rank each of the songs per album (i.e. for Walk The Sky - Clear Horizon being my #1, Forever Falling being my #2, etc.). I can't imagine the nightmare in trying to add that into the calculation.

This is really damn cool though MuffinMcFluffin...thanks for putting this together.

I think that's a fair point, for sure. I wouldn't mind adding that in, but then that means more for you guys when it comes to ranking things, haha.

[gbruin]

Damn, this is cool. Strong strong work, Muffin.

My order came out pretty much as I expected, though I would have guessed that Fortress would have finished ahead of AB III. Fortress has a couple of 5s and 6s though while AB III was more consistently in the 3s and 4s. I'm curious how much separation I have between Fortress, III, and Walk The Sky.

The cool part to me...
One Life
Writing On The Wall
In The Deep
Godspeed
The Uninvited
Make It Right
Rise Today/Losing Patience
Waters Rising
You Will Be Remembered
Cry A River
Twilight
Save Me
Tear Us Apart

Those are my 6s (or tied for 5 with Rise Today/Losing Patience). That lineup, compared to all the other stuff out there in the music world, is still a really good album.

[MuffinMcFluffin]

Damn, this is cool. Strong strong work, Muffin.

I'll just say that the 6's are rather punishing, while the 1's are pretty rewarding. Not embarrassingly so, but enough to possibly make the dent.

Here are your relative rankings:

1) ODR - 10.00
2) BB - 8.31
3) AB III - 7.24
4) Fortress - 6.52
5) WTS - 5.69
6) TLH - 4.50

If you weighed them on a standard metric alone (the 6-5-4-3-2-1 scoring scale), the averages for you came out to:

1) ODR - 4.67
2) BB - 4.13
3) AB III - 3.68
4) Fortress - 3.23
5) WTS - 2.96
6) TLH - 2.39

So I guess it's not that unbelievable, heh.

[zazthespaz]

Neat stuff McFluff! My ranking is ODR > Fortress > WTS > BB > TLH > ABIII

I'm surprised to see Fortress at #2, but it's not unreasonable. Good work!

[Timotheus]

Blackbird
One Day Remains
AB III
Fortress
Walk the Sky
The Last Hero

That's pretty close. Maybe swap AB III with Fortress, but for the rest, spot on.

[Blackbird]

The only real surprise for me is that TLH is in front of Blackbird. AB III being first and Fortress second is exactly the expected result.

Great work, Muffin!

[The Dissident]

Finally took the time to fill out the spreadsheet:

Fortress
Walk The Sky
AB III
Blackbird
One Day Remains
The Last Hero

Personally I reach for Blackbird the most. But on my last discography run when WTS came out all the albums sat at around a 91/100 score with Blackbird at a 93 and TLH at 89 so really this order is likely subject to change with time since I think all the albums are great.

[MuffinMcFluffin]

Finally took the time to fill out the spreadsheet:

Fortress
Walk The Sky
AB III
Blackbird
One Day Remains
The Last Hero

Personally I reach for Blackbird the most. But on my last discography run when WTS came out all the albums sat at around a 91/100 score with Blackbird at a 93 and TLH at 89 so really this order is likely subject to change with time since I think all the albums are great.

I'm definitely going to tinker with this more, but as you must remember all we are doing is ranking songs by track number per album, not giving the songs scores. Perhaps we should do a bit of the latter?

Looking at your rankings though, I can see why it didn't spit it out as #1 or anything.

Thanks for filling it out!

[gbruin]

Yes. Yes we should do a bit of the latter.

I'll be right over here waiting.

[AngusWolfe]

There are some tough fights in there, track 8 has a very high hit rate. I did feel this gave some easy passes to tracks I don't normally give praise to, like I did not expect such an easy win for Tear Us Apart or The End is Here (although this has reached new heights with the RAH album). My versions of the Albums don't include Save Me or the Blackbird tracks after Wayward One, nor the ABIII.5 tracks, those would be part of the "Rarities" CD from the O2 live album for me, which would be interesting to see how it would stand as a standalone album, even though it was not constructed as such.

My final score:
Fortress
Blackbird
Walk the Sky
One Day Remains
ABIII
The Last Hero

The only thing I didn't expect was ODR above ABIII, But then my favourite songs on ABIII were put against better competition, like Slip to The Void being against Cry of Achilles, meaning Words was the only P1 it got. Open Your Eyes and Broken Wings also got wins purely because I have more nostalgia for those tracks versus some of the others.

[Inconquerable]

Very cool, Muffin! I actually think this came out pretty accurately for me, though I don't know how I would rank The Last Hero, One Day Remains, and AB III if I were to just list them in order. It's difficult to say though because all of the albums are great. But Fortress and Walk the Sky being my top two make sense for sure, and I'm not as into Blackbird (bar a few songs) as I am about the other albums.

I'd love to see what else you can come up with on things like this. Giving individual songs scores as you mentioned previously would probably be daunting on your end, but definitely a very interesting project to undertake.