Cracking thread. I actually think it's a pretty decent list in the end, a few oddities aside. But I guess that's the point isn't - you can't please all the people all the time, there is no such thing as a universally accepted classic.
Everyone has that game which they believe to be brilliant, and that they cannot see a way that anyone could possibly disagree. But there will be people out there, probably more of them than you think, who just don't agree. Not because they are being dicks, or are trying to be vindictive, but just because they simply don't think the game is great like you do, and that is okay.
OrangeRakoon wrote:On a more serious note, I did actually have some thoughts about how this could be done in a more effective but still novel manner. Phase one, blind nominations. Everyone would PM a list of top games, perhaps limited to somewhere between 10 and 50. When nominations close, the votes would be tallied and we'd get an initial list of games ranked by how many times they were independently nominated. Phase two, the public culling. Everyone would get one post running through the list, voting down every game they don't want up there (with reasoning). Each vote against would take one off the games score, until it hits zero and gets removed. So if 10 people all nominated a game, it would need 10 votes against to completely remove it. Games that no one has heard of apart from the one person who nominated them get at best a score of 1, so that's not too much of an issue.
This would be a pretty good setup as well - although the blind nominations loses the ability to catch those games you forgot about until someone mentioned them (though one could argue if you had to be reminded of it then was it really that good for you?) Additionally I would recommend that in Phase 2 the ranked list doesn't indicate how many votes each game got - that way you avoid the situation where people know that a game they don't like got 10 upvotes so they go out of their way to find 10 people to down vote it.
Also I think the need to provide a reason behind a veto is a smart move - that and the fact that people should need to have played a game to veto it!