Quillion
Smash Hero
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2014
- Messages
- 5,644
The Ballot was an utter farce looking back on it, and that goes for both Nintendo for making it and the fans who voted on it.
For Nintendo, they had barely any method of anticipating whether the character would be doable or not. They had no way of separating first party characters, most of which they would have no trouble getting the rights to, from third party characters, all of which would require a large amount of negotiations.
For the fans, they flooded the ballot with incredibly unrealistic requests. Anything from non-video game characters like Goku to joke requests like a Goomba. It also didn't help that the companies behind the characters started getting in on the action by starting their own campaigns to get their characters into Smash.
This is just a small sampling of the reasons why I think it was just a bad idea, and badly done at that. All of this and more just led to the ballot being an utterly chaotic, disorderly mess that could never really succeed at its goal.
If a ballot is ever going to work again (probably for next Smash), they better take some cues from Fire Emblem Heroes' Choose Your Legends' poll: make it closed in some fashion and force the fans to choice from a vast selection from that. Perhaps even go one step further and after a preliminary voting, close the choices to a top three and have them vote from there. And they should separate first party and third party characters while they're at it.
For Nintendo, they had barely any method of anticipating whether the character would be doable or not. They had no way of separating first party characters, most of which they would have no trouble getting the rights to, from third party characters, all of which would require a large amount of negotiations.
For the fans, they flooded the ballot with incredibly unrealistic requests. Anything from non-video game characters like Goku to joke requests like a Goomba. It also didn't help that the companies behind the characters started getting in on the action by starting their own campaigns to get their characters into Smash.
This is just a small sampling of the reasons why I think it was just a bad idea, and badly done at that. All of this and more just led to the ballot being an utterly chaotic, disorderly mess that could never really succeed at its goal.
If a ballot is ever going to work again (probably for next Smash), they better take some cues from Fire Emblem Heroes' Choose Your Legends' poll: make it closed in some fashion and force the fans to choice from a vast selection from that. Perhaps even go one step further and after a preliminary voting, close the choices to a top three and have them vote from there. And they should separate first party and third party characters while they're at it.