Minus 'Ravenghast' and 'Hear the Night' , I would have given a perfect 10 to this album. But still AOTY for me in this genre.

I went through the comments of 'Draconian Times' and read all those who hated the album because they heard it in a wrong time. I think everyone should re-visit all those Doom albums of 90s and 2000s again in this year as 2020 turns out to be the best year for all sort of Doom bands. Even i have to admit that I started to listening all Doomsters in this year only.

Ummm, great rating, maybe just for that guitars?

After listening for a month or so Obisidian easily comes close to Draconian Times and Icon. May even finish as AOTY for me and probably sometime in the future as the best PL album ever.

I myself gave a 10 too but there's something wrong with this album's rating. The staff should check for fake votes.

Written by un/heart/ed on 21.06.2020 at 17:51

I myself gave a 10 too but there's something wrong with this album's rating. The staff should check for fake votes.

Sorry, but that makes zero sense.

If you believe that this deserves full score, then why shouldn't other users be permitted to give exactly the same rating?
And If you happen to think that the average rating is too high, then I'd recommend to set a good example by adjusting your 10/10.

I gave a 10. Couldn't hold more. Been spinning everyday since the release.

Written by Starvynth on 21.06.2020 at 19:27

Written by un/heart/ed on 21.06.2020 at 17:51

I myself gave a 10 too but there's something wrong with this album's rating. The staff should check for fake votes.

Sorry, but that makes zero sense.

If you believe that this deserves full score, then why shouldn't other users be permitted to give exactly the same rating?

Erm, because I strongly suspect some of those users are fake, just created to give fake votes. That's the point I am trying to make here. You know, fairness? I am not questioning the album's quality.

Written by un/heart/ed on 21.06.2020 at 17:51

I myself gave a 10 too but there's something wrong with this album's rating. The staff should check for fake votes.

Even though we typically look into downvote abuse more than the opposite, I will investigate this tonight and report back to you with my findings.

Written by un/heart/ed on 21.06.2020 at 17:51

Erm, because I strongly suspect some of those users are fake, just created to give fake votes. That's the point I am trying to make here. You know, fairness?

You're probably the first die-hard fan ever to report inflated fake ratings regarding your favorite band...
Now that's what I'd call a strong moral compass!
I like that.

From the Draconian Times I didn't hear anything that good about them.

Written by Troy Killjoy on 22.06.2020 at 04:19

Even though we typically look into downvote abuse more than the opposite, I will investigate this tonight and report back to you with my findings.

Written by Starvynth on 22.06.2020 at 12:33

Written by un/heart/ed on 22.06.2020 at 02:45

EDIT: Within 24 hours of making the following post, Metalstorm staff seem to have done an amazing job of addressing this. Stats mentioned below no longer apply. ///

So I decided to have a look into this. Summary of my findings: positive vote abuse appears to be a major issue, at least in this case.

In total, the album currently has 165 votes of 10/10.

Of those 165, there are 85 of the accounts (52%) that were created since this album was released on May 15th. Seems on the high side.
Of those 85 new accounts, 75 of them (88%) have not been seen online again within 2 days of making their account. The vast majority haven't been online in weeks now.

Out of those 85 new accounts, there are 41 accounts (25% of the total 10 votes) who ONLY voted for this album. Example below. Yes, there are 41 accounts exactly like this:
- http://www.metalstorm.net/users/album_votes.php?user_id=258439

There are a bunch more on top of those 41 that only made a few votes, or gave 10's to all Paradise Lost albums. Or perhaps took the chance to knock down something they didn't like:
- http://www.metalstorm.net/users/album_votes.php?user_id=250251

There are also a number of accounts who's only activity is to post a single generic comment about this album. For example:
- http://www.metalstorm.net/forum/search.php?user_id=257699&user_name=mechanix1980&searchwhere=posts
- http://www.metalstorm.net/forum/search.php?user_id=258305&user_name=john_taylor78&searchwhere=posts
- http://www.metalstorm.net/forum/search.php?user_id=259433&user_name=UniversalSun&searchwhere=posts
-http://www.metalstorm.net/forum/search.php?user_id=261227&user_name=XaraMiiA&searchwhere=posts

Hoping you guys have some sort of automated system in place to identify these kind of stats, because yes, this was painful to do manually!
Is it worth considering implementing some new rules to protect against this? E.g. You can't rate an album until your account is at least 1 week old? That might be just enough effort to deter people.

Another option would be display different scores. Kind of like how some sites have a 'user rating' and 'staff rating'. You could have a score that is the average rating from qualified members (where qualification might depend on being a member for over a year, or having a certain amount of community points, etc).

Apologies for hijacking this thread with non-album related discussion.

Written by Moose on 06.07.2020 at 13:00

Good work.

Thank you very much for doing my job I had already gone through some accounts and was planning to dive deep into it eventually. The rating of this album is ridiculously high and it is clearly the result of vote abuse. I promise to look at your findings and delete the votes that should be deleted as soon as I find the time. Unfortunately, we don't have an automated system, we have to go through each and every one account like you did.

There have been many discussions and suggestions about this problem both in the "ideas and suggestions" thread and in the "rating abuse" thread. If anyone wants to chime in on this, please use those threads. This particular problem with Obsidian will be solved soon so let's keep this thread to only discuss the album. Moose, thanks again for all the work you did.

edit: All the single votes from users that came for a few seconds and then disappeared were deleted (because we don't like wham bam thank you ma'am), as well as votes from multi-accounts that were also banned into oblivion as an extra measure so that I don't have to waste my valuable time again.

Wow ! An incredible job! but i am amazed at how you initially seemed to have doubts about the false votes.
But now, i wonder if albums like this one have passed under our nose the last years hummm... or for each years lol.

I too was wondering how this album had such a high rating. i absolutely love some of the songs, but there 2 or 3 meh ones too.

usually there are downvotes that cause problems, surprised to see upvote abuse too

Looking at the average rating right now (8.6) staff seems to be cleaning up, successfully so.

Talk me about "Ghost" ... oh my... this guitars

Nice album. Not my favorite of this year, but very interesting, and awesome to be a Doom Metal album

Maybe not AOTY but darker thoughts is song of the year for sure

Goddamnit, I love this record and I love this band.

This is a good album but I dont think its AOTY. There are so much better albums in this year.

Written by Moose on 06.07.2020 at 13:00

Thanks for looking into this

It's unfortunate what has happened to the rating system on here, I've basically started to just follow certain member's whose taste I like and pay a lot less attention to the best rated albums. This is sad because I used to really like seeing what was in the top ten but over time it has skewed more and more towards bands with aggressive fanbases. The average score has also trended down quite considerably over the years which I'm guessing is a manifestation of fanbases voting down contenders for their favorite band's coveted slot.
1) I agree with the idea that you need to have an account for a year before your votes start to count.
2) Accounts should be scrutinized if multiple accounts are made from the same IP address (not sure if that can be seen on MS end though).
3) I also wonder whether accounts should even be given the right to give votes less than five unless they've earned enough community points or existed for a certain period of time. I know I've never given anything less than a five, if something I've listened to was ever that bad I would have never finished the album and therefore couldn't honestly rate it, you know? I also rate only about 10% of the albums I listen to, typically because I feel it's unfair to rate down things in genres that I'm not a fan of (thereby making my rating artificially low) or because I wasn't interested enough to listen multiple spins which is necessary to give something a "real rating."
4) Could metalstorm have a separate "staff rating average" where only selected accounts are able to vote. I find myself agreeing far more with staff reviews than I do with the aggregate reviews so it'd be nice if there was an aggregate specific to staff reviews.

Anyway, it annoys me every time I see this album at the top of the reviews. It's pretty obvious there's voting games going on here, it has nearly double the votes of any other band in the top 20.

Don't know what is happening here (again) but ever since Draconian's new album came out the rating suddenly went up with Obsidian. I think it wasn't even in the top 5 before the end of October. Smells like an AOTY boycott to me.

Written by R0$ch on 03.11.2020 at 18:21

Don't know what is happening here (again) but ever since Draconian's new album came out the rating suddenly went up with Obsidian. I think it wasn't even in the top 5 before the end of October. Smells like an AOTY boycott to me.

it was back and forth with Necrophobic for awhile, then Draconian and Mors Principium Est knocked it down initially, but it has rebounded. If you check the top 10 albums, and look at the people who ranked the other top 10 albums poorly (like, 1, 2, 3, 4) you'll note that a ton of them ranked Obsidian as a 10, so I'm inclined to agree with you.

It really sucks to see how much the score of this album dropped within the last month. This is easy the AOTY pick for me.

Written by NSixtyScore on 14.11.2020 at 00:20

It really sucks to see how much the score of this album dropped within the last month. This is easy the AOTY pick for me.

I deleted some obvious abuse votes which bumped the 8.4 up to 8.5 (barely). Not a huge difference, but most of the low ratings seem at least genuine (eyeing a couple of those 1s which I'll keep an eye on for future behavior).

8.5/448 votes is a high rating.

Written by JoHn Doe on 14.11.2020 at 07:44

8.5/448 votes is a high rating.

Deservedly so. Even though my own score scales toward the lower end of the 8 spectrum, I can understand the appeal and why so many people think of it as being closer to masterpiece/perfect territory.

Objectively the best work of 2020. There are no flaws in the album, everything is very high-level. You can feel the same atmosphere of the Draconian Times album and it's beautiful!

Yeaahh I dunno. Never really felt this album. Its not bad, I'm just not hearing anything special like many users here. I bought this album and Icon at the same time and pretty much only listened to Icon. I hadn't heard either album before. Of the two, I found Obsidian to be boring with very few highlights. I rarely listened to it over Icon. The further you go into the album, the more boring it gets. The top 3 tracks in my media player have 2x the listens as the last 3 cause I just got bored halfway through and put Icon back on. Obsidian is better than Medusa for sure... but i'm not really sure that is much of an achievement.

Highlights: Ghosts, The Devil Embraced