The Marquee release structure owns bones.

"Bulldog1205;c-1599505" wrote:

"NicWester;c-1599498" wrote:

"Tactyou;c-1599405" wrote:
Marquee event was nice from its initial launch. It was like dating a hot girl for the first time and she was sweet. Only to learn later that if you don’t drive a Ferrari, can’t afford to dine on a fancy restaurant, can’t afford first class seat....

Okay, but the entire point of this post is that it's ALWAYS been this way. It's just that with marquee events we get 50 shards and wait a couple months; before marquee events we got 0 shards and waited even longer.

People have this notion that some day in the past there was a point where characters were released directly into stores and that they were never paid for. It's also completely and demonstrably false.

But it’s not false at all. New characters were released all over the place. Usually there were multiple characters released, and a lot of them were free while 1 had to be paid for. I forget what it was called, but it was a different pack type that doesn’t exist anymore. And yes, this was usually the best of the new characters to come out. And what I hated was that we had no idea when he would be available, and they didn’t become available in order. Rex was locked away forever. B2 went free in like a month or 2. It had its own problems. But yes, new characters went directly to the store all the time.

Dude, I talked about that. Read the post.

New characters were released primarily to Chromium and Aurodium packs, or for a brief period to tournaments. You're misremembering them as being "released all over the place" because you're only remembering the poin where you had access to them, not the point where they were actually released. They could debut in a pack that you had to buy with crystals, but since any of us didn't pay for them it was easy to ignore the character. Months later, if we were lucky, that character would be placed into a store or a node and then we would start farming. But that was MONTHS later and what people are doing is convincing themselves that THAT was the launch of the character. It would be like saying Darth Maul is only as old as ships because that's when he became free.

New characters categorically did NOT go directly into the store unless that store was just created. Jawa Scavenger, Chief Nebbit, Bodhi Rook, Colonel Starck, Wompa. That's it for new characters in existing stores. Maaaybe Magmatrooper, but going through the updates as I did, I couldn't find an announcement of when he was put into the galactic war store. Five, potentially six characters out of 159. Jawa Engineer, Gamoran Guard, Hermit Yoda, and General Greivous were added directly to stores when those stores (Guild, Guild Event, and Shard Shop, respectively) were created. We'll be generous and include those as well--though I think if they added a new store every time they wanted to add a new character, people would get more than a little mad--and we still only hit double digits if we include Magmatrooper, who is iffy.

Look for yourself. The history of the game is written in the Game Updates and Developer Announcements threads.