Same as every year, my list of 2014 albums I listen and care to give a rating to.

1.Bloodbath - Grand Morbid Funeral

2.Los Random - Pidanoma

3.The Atlas Moth - The Old Believer

4.Giant Squid - Minoans

5.Behemoth - The Satanist

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This is close to my final list for this year.

1.Mors Principium Est - Dawn Of The 5th Era

2.Evergrey - Hymns For The Broken

3.Insomnium - Shadows Of The Dying Sun

4.Scar Symmetry - The Singularity (Phase I - Neohumanity)

5.Ghost Brigade - IV - One With The Storm

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1.Insomnium - Winter's Gate

2.Kauan - Sorni Nai

3.Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini

4.Wilderun - Veil Of Imagination

5.Steven Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)

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1.

2.Fates Warning - The Spectre Within

3.Slauter Xstoyes - Winter Kill

4.Watch Tower - Energetic Disassembly

5.Trilogy - Life On Earth

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1.Sólstafir - Ótta

2.Behemoth - The Satanist

3.Insomnium - Shadows Of The Dying Sun

4.Primordial - Where Greater Men Have Fallen

5.Falloch - This Island, Our Funeral

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1.Fallujah - The Flesh Prevails

2.Dark Fortress - Venereal Dawn

3.Winterfylleth - The Divination Of Antiquity

4.Agalloch - The Serpent & The Sphere

5.The Contortionist - Language

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So now it's routine.

1.Ne Obliviscaris - Citadel

2.Nightingale - Retribution

3.Primordial - Where Greater Men Have Fallen

4.Ghost Brigade - IV - One With The Storm

5.Boris - Noise

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Here are all of the top albums that have come out since I was born in 1993!

1.Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses

2.Amorphis - Tales From The Thousand Lakes

3.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

4.Edge Of Sanity - Crimson

5.Emperor - Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk

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Subject to change from time to time. (Currently in a remaking process)

1.Avenged Sevenfold - Waking The Fallen

2.Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier

3.Avenged Sevenfold - City Of Evil

4.Opeth - Still Life

5.Ne Obliviscaris - Citadel

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1.Opeth - Pale Communion

2.Sólstafir - Ótta

3.Lunatic Soul - Walking On A Flashlight Beam

4.Ne Obliviscaris - Citadel

5.Insomnium - Shadows Of The Dying Sun

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1.Leprous - Bilateral

2.Ne Obliviscaris - Portal Of I

3.Persefone - Spiritual Migration

4.Threshold - March Of Progress

5.Witherscape - The Northern Sanctuary

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I haven't used this website seriously in a long time, but I think it would be fun to catalog my favorite Metal releases from the past decade.

1.Devin Townsend - Empath

2.Darkspace - Dark Space III I

3.Kayo Dot - Hubardo

4.Bell Witch - Mirror Reaper

5.Deftones - Koi No Yokan

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2000-2004 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5844
2005-2009 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5838
2015-2019 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=6722

I sure do love this site and it's rating system, it makes finding great music so easy and, even more importantly, when an album is overlooked for a while but starts getting a buzz a few months later, boom, there it appears in the top 20.

All that being said, I still wish there was some way to get a weighted ranking that not only takes the rating of the album into account, but also the number of votes that were cast. For example, an album with a rating of 8.8 and 1000 votes would rank higher than an album with a rating of 8.9 and 20 votes. So, I scraped all the albums on the site with at least 1 vote into a database. Then, taking a leaf out of IMDb's book, I used Bayesian estimation (like the IMDb's Top 250) to calculate a weighted rating for each album based on its Metal Storm rating and the number of votes it had received.

The formula for calculating the Top 100 Albums gives a true Bayesian estimate:
Bayes rating (BR) = ( C × m + R × N ) ÷ ( m + N ) where:
C = average expected rating given...
m = minimum number of votes
R = average rating for the album = (Metal Storm rating)
N = number of votes for the album = (votes)

The way the Bayesian estimator works is that all albums in the database are given and additional m fake votes with an average rating of C, irrespective of how many true votes it already has. Then a new weighted rating is calculated...
If the album has no true votes ( N = 0 ), then BR = ( C × m + R × 0 ) ÷ ( m + 0) = C × m ÷ m = C (the average expected rating).
If the album has a number of true votes equal to the minimum ( N = m ), then BR = ( C × m + R × m ) ÷ ( m + m ) = ( C + R ) × m ÷ 2m = ( C + R ) ÷ 2 (halfway between the two ratings).
If the album has a very large number of true votes ( N >> m ), then BR = ( C × m + R × N ) ÷ ( m + N ) ≈ R × N ÷ N = R (the Metal Storm rating).
This means that the Bayes rating will never equal the Metal Storm rating but will approach it as the true votes grow arbitrarily large.

Now that the maths bit is out of the way, here was my methodology:
Only Studio and EP album types, from the years 2010 to 2014, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2010-2014.
The minimum number of votes (m) was determined by calculating the 75th percentile of the votes, rounded to the nearest 10.
I also decided that if an album's Bayes rating was within 0.005 of #100, it would be included too; hence the +2.

C for 2010-2014 = 7.478
m = 20

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2010 - 24
2011 - 28
2012 - 16
2013 - 22
2014 - 12

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Gallowbraid - Ashen Eidolon

2.Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini

3.Aquilus - Griseus

4.Ne Obliviscaris - Portal Of I

5.Be'lakor - Of Breath And Bone

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This serves as a memory note, pretty much.

1.Insomnium - Above The Weeping World

2.Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud

3.Ghost Brigade - IV - One With The Storm

4.Be'lakor - Of Breath And Bone

5.Metallica - Ride The Lightning

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These are my favorite metal albums

1.Megadeth - Rust In Peace

2.Wintersun - Time I

3.Ne Obliviscaris - Citadel

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