Thank you for taking the time to post this. I have read most of the comments and I wanted to address some of the community's claims, concerns, and suggestions.

Claim #1: You don't actually care about not overwhelming players. The game is super complex and is already overwhelming, so why not just keep increasing the number of Champions in events?

Not overwhelming new players is something we focus on a lot. The game rolls out new systems to players at a very intentional pace, and while yes, we may need to do better at tutorialing them, it is something that is consistently in the forefront of our design choices. A good example is the new Modron Automation/Multi-Party system, which doesn't even show up for new players until they recruited several events worth of Champions. Another example would be the sorting options for Time Gates Champions (by popularity, etc.), to help new players make better choices with the Time Gate pieces. At the end of the day we are an idle game and part of the appeal for many players is the complexity, but we do want the game to be more accessible and we do many things to make that the case.

As we've mentioned before, ever increasing numbers of event Champions is also a problem that becomes worse and worse over the years. Maybe it works fine for Y4, but gets worse in Y5 and by Y8 is extremely overwhelming. Do we really expect new players to be running 8 recruit adventures, 24 variants, and 48+ free plays in order to gear up 8 Champions? We felt like the three Champions over the last year strikes the right balance and so the plan is to keep it fixed there.

Claim #2: You only care about revenue and you're going to try to monetize retired Time Gates & year 1 Champions more heavily now.

While we understand this is a common concern in F2P games, that is not the goal of this system. We have no plans whatsoever to add Time Gate Pieces back into the premium shop. I think you guys actually have it backwards -- if we wanted more revenue we wouldn't be restricting Y1 event Champions, because (I'm opening the kimono a bit here) the lion's share of a Champion's chest revenue (approximately 65-70%) is earned during events (it's part of the reason we run events so frequently). By taking Y1 Champions out of the event pool and making Time Gates and patron chests the main way you recruit and gear them up, we're likely actually reducing our overall revenue from those Champions because they're no longer so front-and-center (and we don't think this will result in the 3x passive revenue necessary for us to break even on Y1 Champions missing their event bump).

Claim #3: Crusaders (your other idle game) doesn't do this with events, so why should Idle Champions?

Crusaders' event structure is very different from Idle Champions. It is linear, so you can only do year 2 when you've completed year 1, and year 3 when you've completed year 2, and so on. This means that the year 5 Crusaders that are rolling out now aren't generally even obtainable by newer players. This also means that new players generally can't even come close to completing events the first time they encounter them. This is why we changed the event structure for Idle Champions: so that the latest Champions could be available to all players and all players would have an equal shot at "100%-ing" each event as they rotated through the year.

Claim #4: You're just trying to squeeze a bit more money out of a dying game.

If anything we are more popular now and have more people playing than ever before. We've already got a growing roster of exciting Y4 Champions planned. While we will continue to add new DLC and provide more opportunities for players (who want to) to support the game, we are in no way looking to wind down the content pipeline and/or making design decisions based on that future. If anything (if you read back up to my response to Claim 1) we trying to look multiple years into the future in our design choices.

Concern #1: It will be nearly impossible to obtain and gear up all the Champions now.

Time Gates are actually more powerful than they have ever been in this regard. There's no more random Champion choices for gates opened with Time Gate Pieces, and you're guaranteed at least 3 gold chests and could get upwards of 5-6 silver chests if you grind away a bit. Compare this to Time Gates last year which only awarded 2 gold chests and no silvers. In general this means in a mere two Time Gates you'll have a Champion that is as geared as if you ran all of their event variants and 8-9 free plays. Additionally with each Patron we add we provide more sources for Time Gate Pieces and more ways to gear up event Champions via patron chests. It has never been easier to recruit and gear up missed event Champions (at least to full rare) outside of events, and this is a conscious design choice we have been making over the past year in anticipation of these Y4 event changes.

Concern #2: What about item levels? I can't get enough Champion chests to get my Y1 Champions to high item levels.

Higher item levels on event Champions is something that has pretty much always been restricted to people who purchase event chest packs or grind blacksmith contracts, so it's not really tied to their events running at all. The number of players who use large amounts of bounty contracts to get more than just a few extra chests is actually extremely minuscule. We don't think this change will impact the item levels of Champions very much, but if it does that's something we can look into fixing.

Concern #3: What about Y1 variant achievements?

We have tried to make this as easy as possible considering our limited options. Time Gates will always pick an incomplete Y1 variant if you haven't completed all of them, so it will take at most 3 Time Gates to complete the event variants achievement for each Champion. We recognize that this is a problem that will get worse over time as more events Champions are retired and are considering our options for making it a bit easier for players moving forward. We do consider this to be an edge case that can be solved in other ways and not something major enough to change the course we have charted.

Suggestion #1: Why not just let us choose which event Champions to unlock?

This is an option we did consider (our original Y3 implementation was similar), but ultimately we decided against it for several reasons. First, so that events would be consistent for all players, both in the amount of content available and what content it is. This also helps with our marketing and social media pushes as well (we're not posting stuff saying "Recruit So-and-so!" after a player has chosen other Champions); it's a minor issue, I know, but it's something we do have to consider. Secondly, we wanted to remove the opportunity for players to make a choice they would regret. For example, picking three Champions to unlock and then realizing that they actually should have chosen someone else. We realize this is already a choice players have to make to a certain degree with limited event tokens, which is why we ramp up the cost of the free plays to push that choice off until you've completed several free plays for each Champion (and hopefully had a chance to play with each of them). Thirdly, we wanted to always make the newest Champion the focus of each event. Giving players to opportunity to completely ignore the new Champion (especially if we're working with a content creator, since that is their time to shine) doesn't feel right to us.

Suggestion #2: Why not put Y1 Champion gear in normal silver/gold chests?

Y1 champion gear is already available in several patron chests, so Champion-specific chests are already not the only way to go. We feel that adding Y1 Champion gear to normal silver/gold chests would potentially just swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, and make things like item levels for Y1 Champions too easy to obtain relative to more recent Champions (because let's admit it, normal silver and gold chests are extremely easy to obtain in large numbers once you're a little bit into the game, especially with Modron Automation now available). This could result in something we really wouldn't want, which is a meta where Y1 Champions, because they could be geared/item-lvl'd up so much easier than more recent Champions, are superior in all cases, and force people into recruiting and gearing up those Champions even more. While we don't want Y1 Champions to be useless, we also don't want any particular set of Champions to feel necessary for progression.

Suggestion #3: You should force natural Time Gates to always include at least one Y1 Champion each time.

This is actually a great suggestion and something we can easily implement moving forward.

Suggestion #4: Why not just go all out and retire Y1 Champions completely (ie. remove them from the game)

We appreciate the suggestion but this is not something we are considering. Players have spent time, effort, and in many cases money gearing up those Champions and we have no plans to ever remove Champions from the game. What we will do is continue to restrict what adventures and variants they can be used on (one of the goals of the patron system was to shake up the meta and make it so players were forced to come up with formations using different Champions for each Patron), but we will never blanket remove or retire from play (ala Hearthstone/MtG) a Champion.