I really saw it as a great event rather than a slap in the face My first thought was now I can use one of my level 1 Orange shaman and

 have Two awesome Champions to hit Hamlets at he same time. 

But I've always tried to be a glass half full type. 

Then you have that struggling player that just wants a break to try and compete that will love this chance to gain advancement in any way they can.

TBH I thought it was a nice idea, I hold a full set of all the orange champs. I got the +7 orange shamen and enlightened it with my +6 leveled it up and hey presto 500 emeralds nice. My only bugbear is my plus 2 orange shamen became a plus 1 and my previous enlightenments didn't stack. That being said with the new monthly champ comp, all emeralds and recharges are saved for that making the leveling up of champions a slow tedious process using just your daily allowances. So the +7 was a nice give away, still as just about all my champs are plus 2 or above, if they do this again I will enlighten down rather than make the sacrifice.

I didn't have a Rank 7 hamlet offence champ. So I gained from this event. I still don't like it.

I don't like it because presumably Plarium will run more and more such events (unless they learn from our feedback) and champ training will become a redundant part of the game. And that isn't a good thing.

A lot of people would agree with the concept of helping "struggling players" and levelling the playing field. But actually the opposite is happening with this update it is hurting the real "struggling" players.

"Stuggling players" that "need a break" aren't the players who do not put in the effort to play the game and do the things needed to earn advantages. They chose not to bother, that is not "struggling".

The true "Struggling players" are those hobby / low level spenders who are trying to compete in a game where Pay to win is dialed up to the max. The only way they can compete with money, is to put more effort into the game. That is extemely hard, a real up hill "struggle".

Champs is one of the few areas where effort is rewarded. It's quite hard and requires effort to train rank 7 champs but the reward is a good advantage. Plarium already did their best to negate this with champ pass dolling out half of giests needed to train a rank 7 each month. So you can already just buy rank 7 champs.

Now apparently, we are just doing to give out rank 7 champs now directly, effectively removing champs training from the game entirely.

a) that is unfair to ppl who invested masses of time and effort into training champs

b) it's removing one of the only advantages a player with little money but the dedication to work hard and play the game hard can earn

c) it's self defeating for the game as a whole, because training champ is one of the few things to actually do in the game - so you are destroying your own gameplay. Not really that smart because there isn't that much to do in the game to start with. I guess we are back to just BG's and PvP.

There will always be some events people  love and  those  same ones others will hate. I will be very interested to see how Many would rather the game did not give every Player that has Holybonds a chance to earn a 7 star Champion when using their hard earned Holybonds. 

I'd rather they didn't, but that's mostly cause I like watching people suicide their troops into my hamlets with a gray 0.5% champ :P