Beyond the Summit creative producer Mikey “The Cheat” Iosue announced Wednesday that the organization will once again revamp its Super Smash Bros. invitational series’ voting system ahead of Smash Summit 14 in November.
An update regarding the Summit voting process…
from the office of @thecheatdotcom ✍️Thread of new info in the replies below ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/qF0ZNmgvOo
— Beyond the Smash (@BTSsmash) September 28, 2022
In July, Beyond the Summit announced a significant rework of its voting system. With those changes, players could only gain votes for spending up to $5. The rationale for making this change was to limit the impact of expensive VIP passes on voting. Instead, the tournament organizers hoped the new system would reward prospective vote-ins for reaching a larger player base rather than appealing to a smaller base with more money.
However, the decrease in money coming in resulted in a drastically lower prize pool. Smash Ultimate Summit 5 had the lowest prize pool of an offline event in Smash Summit history, which was nearly $140,000 less than that of Smash Ultimate Summit 4.
In addition, The Cheat noted that the previous voting changes did not actually encourage more people to vote; Ultimate Summit 5 only saw about 100 more unique voters than Ultimate Summit 4. As a result, Beyond the Summit is aiming to alleviate these problems with another update to the voting process leading up to Smash Summit 14.
New voting system for Smash Summit 14
Like last time, Smash Summit 14 voters will be able to buy a $5 voting pass. This instantly gives them access to 100 votes. In addition, voters will get another 200 votes the first time they spend $25 or more in the Summit merch store. Beyond this, voters will get two votes for every dollar they spend in the merch store, with no limits on the amount of money they spend.
Unlike last time, the number of votes each player has will become visible as soon as the shop opens. In addition, the Summit Countdown will no longer take place in a single day. Instead, there will be four vote-in periods on four consecutive days.
The voting schedule for Smash Summit 14 is as follows:
- Saturday, October 1 – Opt-ins begin
- Tuesday, October 4 – Twitter nominations begin
- Sunday, October 9 – The merch store opens
- Tuesday, October 11 through Friday, October 14 – One player is voted in and four are eliminated each day
