I think that's a fundamental problem with the game's basic model/premise, though. F2p weren't stopping at relic 3/5 for the heck of it. It was a matter of cost effectiveness in a resource management game. You think I wouldn't take my whole roster to r9/10 if I could reasonably get all the materials?
Then there was the whole fireside chat where they addressed people only using r9 on GLs and reqs, and launched into the whole talk about vertical vs. horizontal scaling games. Well, I think it's safe to say a lot of players (especially f2p) would rather it just be horizontal scaling. It doesn't feel good to have a team finished just for them to say, "Ope! Now there's a new gear/relic level and all your finished teams are once again unfinished!" And guess what, now it's r10 that I'll just apply to GLs and requirements. Because it still takes so long to get to the highest relic, f2p want to be prepared for the next big thing which requires multiple r10s all at once.
It's also no wonder that marquees were sitting in rosters for months/years when the goal posts keep shifting. They've tried to address this with eras, and while I went as hard as I feasibly could on the first set to get a feel for what it would take, I suspect this current set and several others will also start sitting in my roster again. There might be the occasional very important era where I unload months' worth of hoarded crystals on the era units, but most I will probably decide not to care about, just like with the old marquee system.
Upping the ante constantly won't make f2p suddenly spend. Changing the price points will. Look how many people said they lost their f2p status for the very first LSBs where you could get nearly all of Rey's requirements for $20 (maybe it was $30 if you still needed the ship too). But they don't necessarily want that, because it's not the sort of cash flow they want to see. Ostensibly the changes are to get seasoned whales who otherwise have everything hoarded up to keep spending the same amounts.
But that's the thing: You can either have a model where everyone pays a certain amount and then are done, and you rely on income from new players, optional content, or other properties, or you can have a constant cash farm model like they do now. Minecraft is a good example of a game that is the former and is still super strong after years and years. If choosing the latter model, like this game, you can't lament in a fireside chat that f2p are efficient with their rosters. There's going to be a downside. Keeping the cashflow from the model they want to use (the upside, I guess) means f2p wait behind the bottlenecks instead of taking the toll way.
