Fellow DTF Ayreon/Arjen Lucassen fans, hello and welcome to the Ayreon/Arjen Lucassen 2017 Survivor!
Arjen’s music is quite popular here on DTF, mostly due to the amount of progressive rock and metal fans frequenting this board—oh, and because it’s also pretty much awesome. I’m not going to describe Arjen’s past or his extensive discography—I’m currently running a thread where I provide some info about Arjen’s albums (we’re currently at Stream of Passion —
Embrace the Storm), so if you want some background about Arjen’s music, you’re welcome to check out
Arjen Lucassen Discography Thread.
For people unfamiliar with Survivor concept, I’ll give a brief explanation right now. The goal of Survivor competition can be seen differently: some people think that the goal is to eliminate their least favourite song each round, until—by the popular opinion—best song remains standing alone, victorious. On the other hand, some people tend to have more strategically inclined view on that matter, and may do anything allowed by the rules to keep their favourite song in the competition—even sacrificing any other songs in order to help their favourite song survive. As far as I’m concerned, neither approach is right or wrong. Ultimately, after all the countless polls and heated discussions, one song remains alive, and this song is the winner of the whole competition. Thus, other than the voting strategy (which you will have to decide on yourself), the other points are fairly simple and are going to be addressed in the upcoming Rules section.
Another thing I wanted to address before we go straight to the Rules section is that I wanted this Survivor to feature both Ayreon albums
and other Arjen records from the side projects like Star One or Guilt Machine. However, as the Roll Call poll showed, the interest in Ayreon albums is way bigger; I expected this from the beginning and therefore the Rules section and the whole schedule is tailored to fit this interest. That doesn’t mean I’m neglecting any Arjen’s side projects (even though we’re indeed skipping two of them), I’m trying to do this so mostly everyone could have fun participating. I also wanted to make the actual Album Survivors more meaningful and more cutthroat, and tried to avoid the situations where about a third of the album ends up in either Finals or Consolations. Therefore I tried to reduce the amount of songs progressing into the next stages of competition until I finally came up with the solution that seems reasonable to me. So if those numbers seem a bit too low to you, don’t be alarmed and give this a chance.
I hope everyone will have fun participating in this, because that’s what it’s all about—fun. With that, let’s address the rules and format of our Ayreon/Arjen Lucassen 2017 Survivor!
Rules and format:1. The Ayreon/Arjen Lucassen 2017 Survivor is going to take most of the year (surprise), feature nine Ayreon albums from
The Final Experiment to the newest yet-untitled Ayreon album #9, along with both Star One albums, Guilt Machine album
On this Perfect Day, The Gentle Storm album
The Diary and Arjen’s solo album
Lost in the New Real.
Unfortunately, Ambeon and Stream of Passion albums won’t be featured in the Survivor, because of their low popularity as determined by the
Roll Call poll held on the previous week.
2. The Survivor Polls are going to be separated into three different units:
- Ayreon Survivors — this unit will feature nine Ayreon Album Survivors, Ayreon Consolations and Ayreon Finals
- Arjen Lucassen Survivors — this unit will feature five Arjen Lucassen side-project albums, Arjen Lucassen Consolations and Arjen Lucassen Finals
- Ayreon/Arjen Lucassen Spin-off Survivors — this unit will feature other Survivors, hosted for fun and having no bearing on the main results of the competition
After both Ayreon and Arjen Lucassen Finals are over, the winner of the competition is going to be determined in the Grand Final League (read the section about songs distribution below).
3. The format of the Survivor and the number of songs advancing from each stage to the next is as follows:
There are two brackets, one filled with Ayreon albums, one filled with Arjen’s side-projects’ albums. Both brackets progress separately until the winner is crowned in each one; best songs from each bracket advance to the Grand Finals League, where each song is matched against others, and the song which will have the best statistics after 15 Rounds will win the whole tournament.
4. Each round for the Album Survivors will last 48 hours. Each round for Consolations and Finals will also last 48 hours; with the exception of the both Finals last rounds, which will last 72 hours. Each round for Grand Finals League will also last 48 hours. There will (almost) always be two Albums Survivors running separately, along with a Spin-Off Survivor of some kind.
5. The tiebreakers will be held in case of any ties occurring in any round. Any tiebreaker will last 24 hours. If the main round ended in a tie, tiebreaker is inevitable despite anyone wanting to change their vote (the exceptions will be made if the vote was placed mistakenly and admitted before the poll ends). If any tiebreaker also ends in a tie, the song that received fewer (hello, Stannis) votes in the previous rounds of the actual Survivor advances further. If the amount of received votes is the same, I will ask
Nick (the mod who’s the biggest Ayreon fan on this board) to break the tie—although he doesn’t know that yet. Nick is participating too, so I will ask someone else.
6. The respective bonus tracks from each album won’t be included. They may appear in a Spin-Off Survivor of some kind, but not in the main competition.
The Theory of Everything is going to be run as an album with four songs. All the intro tracks that are separate tracks on their respective albums (like Lift Off or Welcome to the New Dimension) will be listed as separate tracks in the polls.
I think that’s mostly it for the Rules and Survivor format, but I also want to do a FAQ with some points that I could’ve left unclear:
FAQQ: When will the actual Survivor begin? First this Roll Call poll, now that starting post, and still no actual album polls?
A: The Survivor will begin after Kamelot Survivor ends, which makes it about two weeks from now on, maybe two and a half; probably in the end of January. I’ve got one more important thread to set up before we begin, though.
Q: Didn’t you say this whole thing was a Survivor? Why switch to the League format in the end?
A: The thing is, the Roll Call poll showed there’s way more interest in Ayreon albums (the most popular Ayreon album got 14 votes, while the most popular side-project album got 8 votes), and I feel that if I mix both Ayreon and side-project albums early in the Survivor, we will have a whole bunch of people who would skip the voting because they don’t know the songs. Therefore, I’ve got to mix them in the end; and the League format will allow people to abstain from voting in the matchups they’re not too familiar with the songs.
Q: There are going to be twelve Ayreon songs in the Grand Finals, and only four side-projects’ songs to compete with them. Why is there such a disbalance?
A: First off, it’s not that huge of a disbalance. If we assume that Ayreon album #9 will have 15 tracks (I think I saw Arjen saying something like that somewhere on FB), we’re up to 114 Ayreon tracks in the competition, while there are only 46 non-Ayreon songs. That’s roughly 2.5 times more Ayreon songs. Add the fact that Ayreon seems to be more popular than Arjen’s side-projects, and here you have the 12:4 ratio.
Q: How come
The Human Equation will have two songs in Consolations, while all other albums, including
Into the Electric Castle, have only one? Is it your personal bias?
A: Yes. Actually, not only
The Human Equation has the most songs out of all albums in competition, it also was the most popular in the Roll Call poll, so I thought it deserves that extra song in Consolations.
Q: Why are you doing the tiebreaker for every round with a tie? Isn’t it pointless in the earlier rounds?
A: I kind of want to see what happens when you put one non-fan-favourite song against another one. Those usually end up being good fun, even though they require more time to get through each Survivor.
Now, I tried to cover it all in this post, but I definitely forgot something. If you have any questions, ideas and suggestions, feel free to ask the questions and put the ideas forth! Go ahead and discuss the rules and the format, and if there will be enough people who aren’t satisfied with these decisions, I still have a few days to change them.
Also, don’t forget to watch the Polls / Survivors Forum for more Ayreon/Arjen Lucassen 2017 Survivor related threads in the next few days. You don’t want to miss it.
Let the discussion begin!