Yeah… This sucks…

anyone using crystals on this needs to be smart about it to do better in collosium you need to buy the crystals packs in the era store  the tab that has the store gift and crystal purchase options  at the bottom are gamble packs that can be used to lvl the era character up the shards aree not gonna do a ton other then open up more shard availability via the marque event 

I'm waiting for someone to show me how doing well in Coliseum will result in a better ROI than treating the marquee like I always have and getting what I get from Coliseum.

yeah, the rewards for the coliseum are no where in line with the actual cost.  Top tier pays out 1000 whole coins.  I just spent 6900 coins to increase one single level though thanks to buying a pack of the coins. That means I need to place in the top 10 for 7 days in a row to increase the next level of which there are 100.

Thanks for the heads up mgkkain​  and totally correct ccmoose​ 

For me, the incentive is to essentially pay more now for what ultimately translates to a lower value, easy to farm, resource (gear) at the expense of a much more valuable, hard to farm, resource (hero shards)

3 days ago, I was happy to spend money/crystals to 4 (generally 5) star a hero and then set about gearing said hero up over time, while waiting for the remaining shards to become free to farm.

Today, spending crystals to 4 (or 5) star hero offers little material benefit to the new game mode, and the process of farming materials and gearing heroes is taken away and replaced by a new (arbitrary) resource system.

So the general takeaway appears to be, don’t spend anything, because gear is much cheaper to farm than hero shards, and getting ahead on the hero shards holds no value in the here and now.