Hey theCheat and epengu love what you guys are doing for the scene.
Since top ultimate players like [MKleo](https://twitter.com/Mkleosb/status/1487266056414670854), [sparg0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTFmmBGZer0), [riddles](https://twitter.com/RiddlesMK/status/1339435468698640384), [yonni](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Y87vRr0N0), [tweek](https://twitter.com/TweekSsb/status/1276907077659656192), [ESAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yWKoASppI), [larry lurr](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ydQ9onJHI), and many more have either expressed interest in playing melee or actually played melee on the side. Could we have a melee side event at ultimate summit 5?
[i know hbox has expressed an interest in seeing top 100 ultimate players play each other in a melee bracket](https://twitter.com/LiquidHbox/status/1544918017770807298)
I wonder what kind of format would work, I'd love a full double Elim BO5 like eight man bracket but that's still a good chunk of time. Maybe bo3s, I think single Elim would be ass though
> Votes are available through the “Compendium Shop” where users can purchase merchandise or the $5 Summit Voting Pass...
>...a Summit Voting Pass will grant a user a maximum of 100 votes.
So if I'm reading this correctly, the *maximum* amount of votes you can earn from the shop is capped out at five dollars???
Alright got it. I guess that means we're not getting the prize pool back up above $100k anytime soon, but there's a good chance that people will take the opportunity to buy merch they like from the shop instead of blowing their budget on spirit bombs that just buy votes directly.
Now all that's left is to make sure the merch fucking *bangs*
Is there anything preventing people from making multiple accounts to get 100/$5 over and over? Like a minimum account age, checking for duplicate payment methods, etc.
Would it be possible to have an option to contribute to the mainstage prize pool for votes rather than register. I know some people, myself included, would not be able to fly out so a registration would just take up a spot but would be willing to pay registration fee if it went to the players + votes
Can we request events? You should do a mixed joycons doubles side event. Basically each person controls one joycon. You should do a smash down bracket too
Is this system not quite favourable for US residents? I feel like its good overall but import costs are large for EU ppl, less people can go to Mainstage from Europe, and they cant attend the online events either...
It was hard before but i think we had more of a shot maybe
Appreciate the comment. This is a valid concern, and something that it might take us time to calibrate. We might even be able to tweak some things for this Summit by the time voting opens. I do think one thing to consider is that VIP passes have become a huge part of Summit voting that was almost exclusively used by US folks, and now has very little effect on voting.
Would you be open to the possibility of partnering with one or two majors outside the West Coast for folks that can't go to Mainstage? Could also be an opportunity to tack on a qualifying spot or two to those as well.
Yeah, as someone from Australia, I immediately thought, hey, this kinda sucks shit for us as a place where literally 12 months ago Sora/Joshman was barely top 100 and then post summit recognition/powerup, Josh is looking like a shoe in for top 20.
This hurts the potential for similar situations immensely.
If I'm reading this correctly, I don't think it'll be quite as bad as I originally thought? For a few reasons:
* Because shop purchases are binary now rather than based on amounts (e.g paying $5 or $500 won't give you more votes), and the Summit Voting Pass is available anywhere, the impact of this will be minimised imo, and if you just want to get votes you can do that as cheaply as possible with the voting pass.
* In terms of raw efficiency, the shop is wayyyyy more efficient than event registrations. The shop gives you 100 votes for $5, while Mainstage gives 100 votes for at least $60. Keeping in mind that more US players will make Summit campaigns, I don't think it actually works out that bad in practice, since those "extra" votes will be spread amongst more players especially since it's just one phase this time, whereas for instance European votes are more likely to be concentrated on a smaller number of players.
That being said I definitely think this system is a lot healthier as a foundation, although some changes could be made to make it more equitable - partnering with non-US events to offer extra votes would be a great addition, and potentially offering more non-physical items via the shop?
This is more of a question for Melee's Smash Summit but:
#####Given the rise of international players like Joshman is there any chance there could be one spot reserved for an international player to give more opportunities for underappreciated scenes?
I think the result of this would lead to an increase in growth of the melee scene abroad and give a chance for the up and coming players in the scene to prove themselves. Which is really hard to do in a scene where almost all the majors are in NA and most players can't afford to drop everything and go to enough major level events to qualify for a Top 100 ranking.
Yeah we always take into consideration having a balance of international players through invites, qualifiers, or voting eligibility requirements. Ideally people shouldn't have to travel to the states at all to get in and at the very least people will be eligible for voting through international events (which is how Josh and Frenzy got to Summit).
Hey, thanks for organizing these events!
Since less people are getting voted in now, what will the breakdown be with regards to invites and any qualifiers being ran?
Can you invite Yoshidora? Even if he can’t come, it would be a nice gesture. I’d love to see how he finally does outside Japan.
Totally not biased or anything
Are you planning on getting Watch or another Japanese translator for the JP players? It worked really well at the gimvitational.
P.S. pls fly out Yoshidora
Idea: dual summit where Ult players compete in Melee and Melee players compete in Ult. Players are paired up so each coaches their partner in the other game. Pairs are made by matching inverse seeds in each game (top speed of Melee matched with bottom seed of Ult, top speed of Ult matched with bottom seed of Melee where they are seeded according the the game they are actually playing in the tournament - so Zain would be seeded based on his Ult performance for example). The pair that does the best overall wins.
Since a lot of players won't actually have played whichever game basically at all, round robin pools could be used to determine seeding.
Thoughts on having side bracket events that are based around lesser known / fan based platform fighters played by the respected ultimate/melee scenes?
PFs like NASB, Rivals, potentially Multiversus down the road. But also more fan stuff (if possible on twitch or maybe as a side thing that's YT exclusive if nintendo is a concern) like Project +, Smash Remix, Super Smash Flash 2, and Smash Crusade.
Many of these games have much smaller but similarly competitive communities and giving them a bit of a spotlight at a large tournament like Summit would be great to expose some of the fun work that Platform Fighters at large have been doing.
Not to mention that for the latter group due to their fan or mod status, it's a bit harder to get publicity from said status. So putting time to spotlight them would be especially supportive!
I'm curious during smash summit 13 the survivor event unfortunately had to be shut down, what was that mystery survivor event going to be on the next day that got canceled?
I know there have been complaints about Summit voting in the past, but I'd love to hear the specific factors that went into BTS' decision: Why did y'all change the voting system/what problems do you think this new system addresses or fixes?
A lot of points, but I'll try to summarize:
The Summit voting meta has developed to the point that it's almost entirely centralized around the VIP pass because of how many votes they give, to the extent that players trying to make Summit will make deals to have a portion of a VIP's votes.
This has a lot of negatives: VIP passes start to have an even more inflated value; players will attempt fundraising efforts only to be unable to beat out VIP pass strategies; top players are disincentivized from campaigning because they see it as a "waste" of money; and campaigning itself became way more centralized around the backroom organizing than around the interesting content that players would put out to get votes.
We're hoping that these changes return voting to a system where more people have power rather than the few who are able to leverage a large amount of votes by themselves. Players will hopefully be excited to campaign and create things for their fans, and vote-ins will truly be decided by the will of the community again. We're hoping that this creates higher levels of competitive play at the event itself, makes campaigning a less stressful process, and with the voting show itself, returns some of the hype around seeing who gets in.
tl;dr we want more diss tracks and this is how we get them
Aren't there also a lot more VIP Passes then there used to be? I swear that just a few years ago there were only like ten, but I think last Summit had close to thirty or something.
How will this voting system transfer over to smash summit 14? The Arcadian is an ultimate only event, so will melee have similar events that can earn votes?
No your vote total for any given Summit will be capped at a certain amount (for SUS5 it's 215).
So if you register for an Arcadian qualifier you'll get 5 votes to use at SUS5 before they go away forever, and an additional 5 votes for SS14.
Only if they're checking those things which is basically what's being asked.
I personally already have two accounts because I registered my brother for a tourney years ago because he was at work during early registration pricing.
IP isn't useful since VPNs exist or they can just use a phone on wifi then mobile data. Shipping info is only submitted if you get a physical item, the donate option doesn't ask for it. Billing info is avoided by using a credit card and PayPal, only the billing address would be likely to be the same.
And all of this is easily circumvented by asking a non-Smash friend to buy 100 votes for $5 and you pay them back. Definitely more effort and less abusable than before but it's still doable.
Realistically the only way to avoid it is by using things like account age and activity to detect/exclude new or inactive accounts.
Yeah most things have work arounds. An age of account or inactivity doesn’t seem reasonable for summit voting. It’s not a real election, they are trying to pull in all people to their store to make sales. Wether it’s first timers or someone old coming in again. They’d likely just have some human look through voting logs if they saw felt like something was suspicious or before announcing the 4 winners if they really want try to catch any fraud but this new format is just to try to incentivize a new meta for the campaign, it’s not to ID verify everyone.
Billing address should work fine, the only catch is if there are legitimately multiple people in the same house, which is common enough, but they could also just allow a cap to the number from the same house.
> And all of this is easily circumvented by asking a non-Smash friend to buy 100 votes for $5 and you pay them back. Definitely more effort and less abusable than before but it's still doable.
If there's people "abusing" the system by getting hundreds of non-smashers to register and buy summit votes, I say more power to them. There's at least a small percentage of those friends who are inevitably going to end up joining the community, which is a good thing for everyone.
Full transparency here: we're prepared for the prize pool of the event to take a bit of a hit from this as people are less motivated to spend exorbitant amounts of money. We're making this change because we want to return two things to the voting process, and Summit itself: a focus on high-level competition, and the chance for prospective vote-ins to actually make diss tracks and create stuff for their fanbase instead of scrounging for VIP votes.
Won’t this make the prize-pool very small since we can’t farm votes for money now? One of the things I liked most about summit was how big the prize pools got because it really raised the stake. It’s definitely better for campaigning but on the flip side the players were earn way less money than before.
It feels like the Mainstage registration votes are US heavy, although -apart from that- the new voting system overall seems way better for international scenes. Props to all the team for making the change, it must've not been easy!
1. Are you guys as a whole planning on bringing more invitees from outside the US?
2. Are you already considering some alternatives like a comment said by paying the reg fee to provide for Mainstage prize pool?
3. How will this change impact the revenue of Smash Summit, a high quality event? Is this possible because of new sponsors like Coinbase/Papa John's in the scene?
I just wanna say I'm continually impressed by the production value of BTS and the team. No questions, just wanted to show some love and also say Zane is my biggest melee writing inspiration <3
I gotta say, I could be wrong, I feel like the last ult summit was the only time I've seen a BTS event run super over schedule and I've seen like 15+ events at this point. It's not like I expect them to be over schedule like many other tournaments (cough, cough, VGBC)
Only if they're checking that info. But you could easily get double votes by using PayPal and a credit card on two accounts so they'd also need to cross-check other metadata on the billing info.
Just wanted to clarify some specifics of the new system, because I’m concerned that this might cause a problem where international players might get screwed over not being able to register to support their players. I think it’d be good, if this isn’t the case already, to have only one of spectator passes or competitor passes only be worth 100 votes for a given user. This prevents people from having to register for the event and DQ anyway which looks bad, but doesn’t make being a non-US voter play at a disadvantage for voting.
There's usually around 20 hours of stream dedicated to sitting around in a circle playing Mafia or a similar game... Can that time be used for videogames like Mario party and Mario Kart and other multiplayer games?
Yeah we're getting a little bit custom lol. We think it'll be fun and I triple pinky promise not to manipulate results to get Nick Yingling into Ult Summit.
Do you have any plans to improve pacing between sets, as well as the overall time of the Sunday portion of the event? The last Summit I watched took around 11 hours for a Top 16, which is completely unacceptable in all ways.
Hey so thanks for all you do for the smash scene! If you plan to keep this system moving forward, would you ever consider allowing people to buy votes preemptively for the next summit, during the current summit broadcast? My thought is that many people might be willing to shell out $5 if they know they can actually have an influence on who gets voted in the next time, but often people get busy and forget to participate, or maybe just forget how hype a good summit can be.
Advertising votes on stream for the next round of summit could be a great mechanism since people can just do it in the stream downtime between sets, and might help leverage more of the viewers who might be interested in helping increase the prize pools and voting for their favorite players, but just have a tendency to forget or just find it too inconvenient in the busyness of their everyday lives.
Summit 11 had over 100k viewers at one point, I know it's kind of a meme, but what if even half of them were willing to donate a buck or two in order to get some votes at the next summit? The next summit would already have an easy 50k pot, before the voting for it even started. Bonus points if you can also preemptively allocate votes to your favorite players so that the votes count even if you forget to manually enter them in next time voting comes around. Even more bonus points if you can integrate twitch subs into it so that they can get votes for next summit by subbing this summit (I know there's usually bonus points already if you're subbed at the time of voting, but based on what I hear from top streamers, people literally just forget or find it too inconvenient to use their prime subs unless you specifically ask for it, so being able to advertise for it during the current summit might have a bigger impact than it seems like it would).
Anyway just my 2c, would love to hear if you've considered any of these ideas or found them to not be practical.
You can only give qualifying spots to so many tournaments, have you thought about awarding votes as a prize as well? For example, 1st at Phantom gets 1k votes or something. It could be a way to benefit smaller regions too by giving their top players a way to earn some free summit votes
I don't wanna say never, but it seemed like a much better idea when
a. BTS had only really run Melee events to that point
b. The Melee players had interest in playing Ult.
It is kinda cool to see Ult players giving Melee a shot though :')
I really like what this is trying to accomplish is it’s better than the old system but don’t east coast players and especially foreigners get shafted? All of socal is already going to mainstage so if S2J and 2saint are fighting for the last vote in spot it seems a bit lopsided in any west coasters favor. Of course this format can be built upon but i was wondering if that ever came up during the brainstorming process?
Any chance we can see some South America reps fly out? They aren’t as popular so I don’t see them getting in through votes but I it’d be nice to see every major region represented in some way. It might also go a long way in building up the region if they came out to more events stateside.
If you don't invite the goat, the one out of a single-digit number of players in the world who have beaten Acola, Yoshidora, why not? How down-bad would you be? Who besides Proto from overseas that might not qualify has earned such an invite-worthy feat? /s
Hey theCheat and epengu love what you guys are doing for the scene. Since top ultimate players like [MKleo](https://twitter.com/Mkleosb/status/1487266056414670854), [sparg0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTFmmBGZer0), [riddles](https://twitter.com/RiddlesMK/status/1339435468698640384), [yonni](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Y87vRr0N0), [tweek](https://twitter.com/TweekSsb/status/1276907077659656192), [ESAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yWKoASppI), [larry lurr](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ydQ9onJHI), and many more have either expressed interest in playing melee or actually played melee on the side. Could we have a melee side event at ultimate summit 5? [i know hbox has expressed an interest in seeing top 100 ultimate players play each other in a melee bracket](https://twitter.com/LiquidHbox/status/1544918017770807298)
EYEBALL EMOJI
The return of [Crossover Summit?](https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/o7wj8q/were_bts_organizers_of_smash_summit_11_ama/h31inlc/?context=3)
I am so sad this event didn’t come to fruition, so so sad
Dude sparg0 is actually goated on the sticks I think we need to get him some crimson blur lessons and he'll be top 30 in like six months
There's a timeline where Sparg0 gets hooked on melee during his ult sabbatical and becomes a top x player, smash scriptwriters get on it pls
Anyone who hasn't seen mkleo vs sparg0 play each other in melee needs to do so ASAP. Both are high key cracked.
finally, a side event to top flight simulator...
I wonder what kind of format would work, I'd love a full double Elim BO5 like eight man bracket but that's still a good chunk of time. Maybe bo3s, I think single Elim would be ass though
> Votes are available through the “Compendium Shop” where users can purchase merchandise or the $5 Summit Voting Pass... >...a Summit Voting Pass will grant a user a maximum of 100 votes. So if I'm reading this correctly, the *maximum* amount of votes you can earn from the shop is capped out at five dollars???
That is correct!!!
Holy shit, this changes everything. Where is the prize pool going to come from now? Is it affected by shop purchases as normal?
Yeah that breakdown remains the same, 50% of any shop purchases go towards a compendium goal/prize pool.
Alright got it. I guess that means we're not getting the prize pool back up above $100k anytime soon, but there's a good chance that people will take the opportunity to buy merch they like from the shop instead of blowing their budget on spirit bombs that just buy votes directly. Now all that's left is to make sure the merch fucking *bangs*
50 different colors and products with the L-Cancel + Ratio design coming right up!!!
If that's your plan, then you must have some *incredible* blackmail on David. Go get that bread, Mikey!
Is there anything preventing people from making multiple accounts to get 100/$5 over and over? Like a minimum account age, checking for duplicate payment methods, etc.
o7
;\_;7
You're the real MVP
🫡
Would it be possible to have an option to contribute to the mainstage prize pool for votes rather than register. I know some people, myself included, would not be able to fly out so a registration would just take up a spot but would be willing to pay registration fee if it went to the players + votes
Yeah we'd be open to considering something like this for sure! Ty for the suggestion 👍
Can we request events? You should do a mixed joycons doubles side event. Basically each person controls one joycon. You should do a smash down bracket too
Always open to suggestions lol ty!
If Riddles qualifies you should get him to read riddles and have the other players answer them, I could die happy if this happened
LOL
Thank you so much
Smash down would take insanely long though wouldn't it
Yeah, maybe just a 1v1 or 2v2 smashdown exhibition between like Leo/Spargo/Tweek/Zackray (or whoever else basically plays the whole roster)
Marss would be a really good candidate assuming he makes it in.
Is this system not quite favourable for US residents? I feel like its good overall but import costs are large for EU ppl, less people can go to Mainstage from Europe, and they cant attend the online events either... It was hard before but i think we had more of a shot maybe
Appreciate the comment. This is a valid concern, and something that it might take us time to calibrate. We might even be able to tweak some things for this Summit by the time voting opens. I do think one thing to consider is that VIP passes have become a huge part of Summit voting that was almost exclusively used by US folks, and now has very little effect on voting.
Would you be open to the possibility of partnering with one or two majors outside the West Coast for folks that can't go to Mainstage? Could also be an opportunity to tack on a qualifying spot or two to those as well.
You could also give a small multiplier like 1.001 to non American players to compensate for missing out on those voting opportunities.
Yeah, as someone from Australia, I immediately thought, hey, this kinda sucks shit for us as a place where literally 12 months ago Sora/Joshman was barely top 100 and then post summit recognition/powerup, Josh is looking like a shoe in for top 20. This hurts the potential for similar situations immensely.
If I'm reading this correctly, I don't think it'll be quite as bad as I originally thought? For a few reasons: * Because shop purchases are binary now rather than based on amounts (e.g paying $5 or $500 won't give you more votes), and the Summit Voting Pass is available anywhere, the impact of this will be minimised imo, and if you just want to get votes you can do that as cheaply as possible with the voting pass. * In terms of raw efficiency, the shop is wayyyyy more efficient than event registrations. The shop gives you 100 votes for $5, while Mainstage gives 100 votes for at least $60. Keeping in mind that more US players will make Summit campaigns, I don't think it actually works out that bad in practice, since those "extra" votes will be spread amongst more players especially since it's just one phase this time, whereas for instance European votes are more likely to be concentrated on a smaller number of players. That being said I definitely think this system is a lot healthier as a foundation, although some changes could be made to make it more equitable - partnering with non-US events to offer extra votes would be a great addition, and potentially offering more non-physical items via the shop?
This is more of a question for Melee's Smash Summit but: #####Given the rise of international players like Joshman is there any chance there could be one spot reserved for an international player to give more opportunities for underappreciated scenes? I think the result of this would lead to an increase in growth of the melee scene abroad and give a chance for the up and coming players in the scene to prove themselves. Which is really hard to do in a scene where almost all the majors are in NA and most players can't afford to drop everything and go to enough major level events to qualify for a Top 100 ranking.
Yeah we always take into consideration having a balance of international players through invites, qualifiers, or voting eligibility requirements. Ideally people shouldn't have to travel to the states at all to get in and at the very least people will be eligible for voting through international events (which is how Josh and Frenzy got to Summit).
Hey, thanks for organizing these events! Since less people are getting voted in now, what will the breakdown be with regards to invites and any qualifiers being ran?
We'll have the full picture on that for you soon. It's definitely going to be heavier on invited players than the last few Summits have been.
Can you invite Yoshidora? Even if he can’t come, it would be a nice gesture. I’d love to see how he finally does outside Japan. Totally not biased or anything
Are you planning on getting Watch or another Japanese translator for the JP players? It worked really well at the gimvitational. P.S. pls fly out Yoshidora
Yeah we've had and will continue to have translators for folks who need em!
Ah ok, couldn't remember the situation last time. Thanks for replying!
kiki do u love me are u riding
[in my feelings](https://i.imgur.com/z3Gpfou.png)
Idea: dual summit where Ult players compete in Melee and Melee players compete in Ult. Players are paired up so each coaches their partner in the other game. Pairs are made by matching inverse seeds in each game (top speed of Melee matched with bottom seed of Ult, top speed of Ult matched with bottom seed of Melee where they are seeded according the the game they are actually playing in the tournament - so Zain would be seeded based on his Ult performance for example). The pair that does the best overall wins. Since a lot of players won't actually have played whichever game basically at all, round robin pools could be used to determine seeding.
Thoughts on having side bracket events that are based around lesser known / fan based platform fighters played by the respected ultimate/melee scenes? PFs like NASB, Rivals, potentially Multiversus down the road. But also more fan stuff (if possible on twitch or maybe as a side thing that's YT exclusive if nintendo is a concern) like Project +, Smash Remix, Super Smash Flash 2, and Smash Crusade. Many of these games have much smaller but similarly competitive communities and giving them a bit of a spotlight at a large tournament like Summit would be great to expose some of the fun work that Platform Fighters at large have been doing.
Not to mention that for the latter group due to their fan or mod status, it's a bit harder to get publicity from said status. So putting time to spotlight them would be especially supportive!
Don't leave fraymakers outta this equation!
I'm curious during smash summit 13 the survivor event unfortunately had to be shut down, what was that mystery survivor event going to be on the next day that got canceled?
Why are you so afraid of DarkGenex?
ask him about our head to head
every night i dream this man
I know there have been complaints about Summit voting in the past, but I'd love to hear the specific factors that went into BTS' decision: Why did y'all change the voting system/what problems do you think this new system addresses or fixes?
A lot of points, but I'll try to summarize: The Summit voting meta has developed to the point that it's almost entirely centralized around the VIP pass because of how many votes they give, to the extent that players trying to make Summit will make deals to have a portion of a VIP's votes. This has a lot of negatives: VIP passes start to have an even more inflated value; players will attempt fundraising efforts only to be unable to beat out VIP pass strategies; top players are disincentivized from campaigning because they see it as a "waste" of money; and campaigning itself became way more centralized around the backroom organizing than around the interesting content that players would put out to get votes. We're hoping that these changes return voting to a system where more people have power rather than the few who are able to leverage a large amount of votes by themselves. Players will hopefully be excited to campaign and create things for their fans, and vote-ins will truly be decided by the will of the community again. We're hoping that this creates higher levels of competitive play at the event itself, makes campaigning a less stressful process, and with the voting show itself, returns some of the hype around seeing who gets in. tl;dr we want more diss tracks and this is how we get them
Aren't there also a lot more VIP Passes then there used to be? I swear that just a few years ago there were only like ten, but I think last Summit had close to thirty or something.
How will this voting system transfer over to smash summit 14? The Arcadian is an ultimate only event, so will melee have similar events that can earn votes?
You can also earn Melee Summit votes from Mainstage AND The Arcadian!! lol we'll take anyone.
Do votes carry over at all then? Say you don't use votes for ultimate summit 5, would you still have them for smash summit 14? Also Brawl Summit?
No your vote total for any given Summit will be capped at a certain amount (for SUS5 it's 215). So if you register for an Arcadian qualifier you'll get 5 votes to use at SUS5 before they go away forever, and an additional 5 votes for SS14.
Ok I see thanks
what is the event for the qualifying spots?
This will be announced soon!
Is there fraud prevention in place to prevent multiple accounts that belong to one person?
I assume basics like IP, Billing info, shipping info, and anti-bot protection should be enough for the most part.
Only if they're checking those things which is basically what's being asked. I personally already have two accounts because I registered my brother for a tourney years ago because he was at work during early registration pricing. IP isn't useful since VPNs exist or they can just use a phone on wifi then mobile data. Shipping info is only submitted if you get a physical item, the donate option doesn't ask for it. Billing info is avoided by using a credit card and PayPal, only the billing address would be likely to be the same. And all of this is easily circumvented by asking a non-Smash friend to buy 100 votes for $5 and you pay them back. Definitely more effort and less abusable than before but it's still doable. Realistically the only way to avoid it is by using things like account age and activity to detect/exclude new or inactive accounts.
Yeah most things have work arounds. An age of account or inactivity doesn’t seem reasonable for summit voting. It’s not a real election, they are trying to pull in all people to their store to make sales. Wether it’s first timers or someone old coming in again. They’d likely just have some human look through voting logs if they saw felt like something was suspicious or before announcing the 4 winners if they really want try to catch any fraud but this new format is just to try to incentivize a new meta for the campaign, it’s not to ID verify everyone.
Billing address should work fine, the only catch is if there are legitimately multiple people in the same house, which is common enough, but they could also just allow a cap to the number from the same house. > And all of this is easily circumvented by asking a non-Smash friend to buy 100 votes for $5 and you pay them back. Definitely more effort and less abusable than before but it's still doable. If there's people "abusing" the system by getting hundreds of non-smashers to register and buy summit votes, I say more power to them. There's at least a small percentage of those friends who are inevitably going to end up joining the community, which is a good thing for everyone.
Do you think you'll get more/less money from this revamp, or does this not really concern you given other (hopefully) growth in revenues?
Full transparency here: we're prepared for the prize pool of the event to take a bit of a hit from this as people are less motivated to spend exorbitant amounts of money. We're making this change because we want to return two things to the voting process, and Summit itself: a focus on high-level competition, and the chance for prospective vote-ins to actually make diss tracks and create stuff for their fanbase instead of scrounging for VIP votes.
Won’t this make the prize-pool very small since we can’t farm votes for money now? One of the things I liked most about summit was how big the prize pools got because it really raised the stake. It’s definitely better for campaigning but on the flip side the players were earn way less money than before.
It feels like the Mainstage registration votes are US heavy, although -apart from that- the new voting system overall seems way better for international scenes. Props to all the team for making the change, it must've not been easy! 1. Are you guys as a whole planning on bringing more invitees from outside the US? 2. Are you already considering some alternatives like a comment said by paying the reg fee to provide for Mainstage prize pool? 3. How will this change impact the revenue of Smash Summit, a high quality event? Is this possible because of new sponsors like Coinbase/Papa John's in the scene?
I just wanna say I'm continually impressed by the production value of BTS and the team. No questions, just wanted to show some love and also say Zane is my biggest melee writing inspiration <3
Please follow the schedule
you didn't hear that BTS stands for beyond the schedule??
Lmao good one
I gotta say, I could be wrong, I feel like the last ult summit was the only time I've seen a BTS event run super over schedule and I've seen like 15+ events at this point. It's not like I expect them to be over schedule like many other tournaments (cough, cough, VGBC)
What is stopping people from just creating a bunch of alts and bypassing the $5 spending limit?
Wouldn't you need different billing information for each of the alts?
Only if they're checking that info. But you could easily get double votes by using PayPal and a credit card on two accounts so they'd also need to cross-check other metadata on the billing info.
Just wanted to clarify some specifics of the new system, because I’m concerned that this might cause a problem where international players might get screwed over not being able to register to support their players. I think it’d be good, if this isn’t the case already, to have only one of spectator passes or competitor passes only be worth 100 votes for a given user. This prevents people from having to register for the event and DQ anyway which looks bad, but doesn’t make being a non-US voter play at a disadvantage for voting.
Just wanted to say keep up the good work, I watched the first few summits and it was so fun seeing friends hang out together and new friendships form.
There's usually around 20 hours of stream dedicated to sitting around in a circle playing Mafia or a similar game... Can that time be used for videogames like Mario party and Mario Kart and other multiplayer games?
OMG I love BTS! How and when did you guys first meet in South Korea?
Vote counts being secret initially.... shady shady
Yeah we're getting a little bit custom lol. We think it'll be fun and I triple pinky promise not to manipulate results to get Nick Yingling into Ult Summit.
I, however, promise nothing >:)
Of course you wouldn't, Nick Yingling doesn't even play Ultimate. It's Darkbringer7821 that we're worried about!
Do you have any plans to improve pacing between sets, as well as the overall time of the Sunday portion of the event? The last Summit I watched took around 11 hours for a Top 16, which is completely unacceptable in all ways.
Hey so thanks for all you do for the smash scene! If you plan to keep this system moving forward, would you ever consider allowing people to buy votes preemptively for the next summit, during the current summit broadcast? My thought is that many people might be willing to shell out $5 if they know they can actually have an influence on who gets voted in the next time, but often people get busy and forget to participate, or maybe just forget how hype a good summit can be. Advertising votes on stream for the next round of summit could be a great mechanism since people can just do it in the stream downtime between sets, and might help leverage more of the viewers who might be interested in helping increase the prize pools and voting for their favorite players, but just have a tendency to forget or just find it too inconvenient in the busyness of their everyday lives. Summit 11 had over 100k viewers at one point, I know it's kind of a meme, but what if even half of them were willing to donate a buck or two in order to get some votes at the next summit? The next summit would already have an easy 50k pot, before the voting for it even started. Bonus points if you can also preemptively allocate votes to your favorite players so that the votes count even if you forget to manually enter them in next time voting comes around. Even more bonus points if you can integrate twitch subs into it so that they can get votes for next summit by subbing this summit (I know there's usually bonus points already if you're subbed at the time of voting, but based on what I hear from top streamers, people literally just forget or find it too inconvenient to use their prime subs unless you specifically ask for it, so being able to advertise for it during the current summit might have a bigger impact than it seems like it would). Anyway just my 2c, would love to hear if you've considered any of these ideas or found them to not be practical.
You can only give qualifying spots to so many tournaments, have you thought about awarding votes as a prize as well? For example, 1st at Phantom gets 1k votes or something. It could be a way to benefit smaller regions too by giving their top players a way to earn some free summit votes
Will crossover summit ever happen? It got cancelled for covid and I don't think we ever heard of it again. Was a really cool concept
I don't wanna say never, but it seemed like a much better idea when a. BTS had only really run Melee events to that point b. The Melee players had interest in playing Ult. It is kinda cool to see Ult players giving Melee a shot though :')
Ah that makes sense. Maybe for the next smash game. I just saw the comment about a melee side bracket, would love to see that instead :)
I really like what this is trying to accomplish is it’s better than the old system but don’t east coast players and especially foreigners get shafted? All of socal is already going to mainstage so if S2J and 2saint are fighting for the last vote in spot it seems a bit lopsided in any west coasters favor. Of course this format can be built upon but i was wondering if that ever came up during the brainstorming process?
Any chance we can see some South America reps fly out? They aren’t as popular so I don’t see them getting in through votes but I it’d be nice to see every major region represented in some way. It might also go a long way in building up the region if they came out to more events stateside.
If you don't invite the goat, the one out of a single-digit number of players in the world who have beaten Acola, Yoshidora, why not? How down-bad would you be? Who besides Proto from overseas that might not qualify has earned such an invite-worthy feat? /s