Is this a joke, Popcap?

To be honest, I was fine with the prize maps when it was all costumes and hats and such. Last month putting the upgrade in the pass and now a new character I think is a bad idea, even though I went and unlocked them. 

Paladins have a battle pass system where you unlock skins, grave markers etc. and the new one just started. It's a bug-ridden mess, but new characters are never put in the battle pass, just skins and other cosmetic stuff. Now the game's model is different, it's F2P or you can buy the pack that means you always get champions when they're released, or you can use gold (coins basically) or their crystals (the RL money currency) to grab new champions. It works pretty well and since you can play that game for free, it makes sense there, not so much in BfN. BfN has an upfront cost so I feel characters should be immediately available to everyone and not in the prize map. As a live service game I know it's expected that people will spend money to support ongoing development (and some of us do), but the monetization of the game is a jumble; it feels like partly a B2P game and a F2P game at the same time. 

The legendary upgrades are a great idea and I love that the Shogun Guard doesn't feel OP, just an option, but 300 rainbow stars for new/returning players vs. just playing through February is not going to help call people to return to the game if they've left for awhile, and new players will feel they have to burn through a lot of cash to catch up, that's going to turn a lot of people off.

You can earn rainbow stars in game, and the weekly challenges have been much better the last few weeks than they first were, but at 60 a week + 150 from the map that's a 390 in 4 weeks. You can buy 1 upgrade with that but let's say 5 upgrades are added by the end of the year and someone gets the game for Xmas, that's 1500 rainbow stars to catch up. That's bad optics and can be very frustrating. BfN, like both GW games, needs a large playerbase to survive and thrive. I really don't want such high barriers to entry like this. 500k coins for the wizard next month sounds decent to most of us as we sit on millions of coins that don't do anything but daunting to a new player. 

I personally like the idea of the timers for spawning bots and pots instead of stickers as it means we can't single-handedly flood a point with outhouse zombies. I also like that when I buy capsules I'm not getting thousands of self-revives and team retries that I'll use a tiny fraction of. But with the lack of sticker packs and the very limited amount of items in the reward-o-tron, coins feel pointless. And while I love the free roam regions, they're possibly my favorite part of the game, these regional currencies are also currently pointless once you 100% everything. This makes the Rux store all the more grating as a lot of the stuff he sells should be in reward-o-tron and it would give us a use for all these coins and/or regional currencies.

On top of that, the grand master ranks don't feel like they much of a point. No new upgrades, 1k coins per level, and increasing your rank plate number (while the plate doesn't change) all feel pointless. Why not add the legendary upgrades to these ranks or give players some more useful reward for these ranks?

One of many reasons I uninstalled Overwatch was their garbage loot box system. A full price game with an obnoxious gamble crate system was bogus and unlike the sticker packs in GW1 and 2, you could, and did, get a lot of repeats that give you a pittance of a currency that you couldn't even use on some time limited items, that game was huge into FOMO. Don't do that here. We need some substantial changes to BfN's currency, prize map, and character/upgrade system that makes the game more welcoming to new people, and more friendly to people's time. We need both long term players like me to stick around, and for people that want to play very casually to feel like they can login and not miss characters and other crucial things, just some costumes and other extra stuff that won't hurt their chance to compete.