Meh, what I care about is the grind. In terms of upgrades for pilots it didn't make the grind any longer. But it made p2p cost more. Think about it in terms of money then yeah it's dumb. If you like games to be oriented towards f2p and casual spending this is a good thing. I don't know if this is what plarium meant when they said pilots were "more" f2p friendly than other games. Except this is really the only major difference, that's positive.

Shared things with "other games" *cough* war robots: Gacha, and premium on changing skills. Oh except sometimes for a limited time mech arena makes their premium cheaper. Except in war robots you only need to change skills when the META changes too much for your liking, not every day. If you care to win as much as possible of course. There's 1 negative difference. The commonality of the premium is not a coincidence either. They modeled the pilots system off war robots because war robots makes money. This is the reason it's like this, not for balance like plarium's lying dogs the cowardly CMs on here say.

There's 1 more negative difference, and that's that we aren't told what implants we can get from the shop. War robots tells us the pilot skills we can get. We can't see what implants can show up in the shop, and there seems to be bias towards some but we can't see the chances. Come to think of it, it's the same for blueprints, except for the bias part. Also it was never called into question whether we can get all the blueprints from the shop, unlike implants. AND PLARIUM HAS IGNORED THE COMMUNITY'S INQUIRIES INTO THIS ALMOST LIKE IT'S TRYING TO PRETEND THE CONCERN ISN'T THERE AND THERE ISN'T A PROBLEM!

And plarium could do some sort of rug pull on the f2p and pocket change friendliness like eventually adding legendary pilots for every weapon type.