I did like that the two "teams of the same color" this time were blue and purple. Some formidable teams you can make with those colors, and I was able to do the challenges without entirely relying on smurfs. That was enjoyable. I'm certainly not a fan of the "earn 1/5 of the character and then you have to buy the rest" events. In the 2 or 3 years that I've been playing, I've never, ever, gotten lucky with one of those 10 chance drops. But, they tend to only do this once a month, and a dev's gotta eat, so if this makes them some money, so be it. We'll get 5 or 6 characters that we can earn this month, and not getting this character gives us something to look forward to in upcoming heroic or sacrifice rotations.

As for people making their "best defenses" it doesn't seem any harder than normal. Certainly a whole lot more smurfs than in a non-Arena event (I say that with love, as I always have a smurf defense team). But every week when you get around 3500 or so, the defense teams become fully max awakened across the board.