Horrible idea... tanking is THE cancer of this game. This league system is an utter joke. On facebook gameroom they might as well not have it because there are bronze thru champions on same squad.
Tanking ruins everything because inevitably about a 1/3rd of the time your "star" player, although usually equally matched on Reds, is tanking, climbing, or battling. This results in VERY lopsided play. Even if they're on sync and battling, your outmatched and your rewards are next to nothing. I see 12MK2 hangers in Gold 3 league way more than occasionally.

Gotta agree with those complaining and I held my breath before the update but with the "preview" of upgrade times I'm a tad shocked. This totally unbalances the game. It was tolerable before but despite possibly getting gear at a faster pace there is no way to use it. This makes no sense unless the goal is possibly to provoke spending that money on gold to shorten upgrade which I will not pay for out of protest. I hope you reconsider or put in avenues to have multiple upgrades simultaneously.
The only way to seriously move up the ladder is to concentrate on a few bots and weapons and get them to levels appropriate for the league. Introducing new gear requires starting over in a major way. If people complained about P2W it will be much worse now.