Obviously I'm not happy with the exploit. im out front now, but this really is a tortoise and hare situation and by the end of the tourney it will likely have cost me many hundreds of dollars to hold my lead over collaborators. The problem isn't just crystals, but also time since a collaborator can spend just a few seconds collecting full points, where I spend several minutes and usually end up losing a character.
I hate to diss new content, but I have a love/hate thing going with this. I seriously doubt I will participate in a future tourney even if the exploit is fixed regardless of the attractiveness of the reward. It's simply too demanding of time and unbelievably more expensive than fishing out an unbiased chromium character. I could have had Rex from zero to full thrice over for what I spent today and obviously that's not going to continue.
The event is fun and challenging. The refresh and reward model is by far the worst thing I've seen come out of the studios.