Looking back at the bidding phase.. there really should have been an upgrade penalty for 'bidding' 0 and getting someone. There are far too many 15 upgrade people.
I think bidding works if everyone bids optimally, but what happened in reality was that a lot of good characters sort of just got ignored by the bids, and then the players who bid 0 on everything would have a chance at one of them. Even then, it was still suboptimal to bid all 0s, since the odds of getting a bad character were higher than the odds of getting a good one. But, with enough players to bid all 0s, a few of them were bound to get lucky. A bid in the 1-3 range on a strong character, in my opinion, was the better strategy. The payout was slightly lower but far more probable.
I could have maybe done a floor for each character (as in, weaker characters require a bid only of 0, whereas stronger characters require a higher bid), but that could result in the issue where players were forced into a character they did not bid the floor on, in which case they'd just play the event with fewer upgrades than other players through no fault of their own.
I guess the most fair solution would be to evaluate the characters myself and just assign them out to players, but that wouldn't be any fun at all for people who wanted a character or element they like.
I don't think it's that major of an issue though. Players who bid optimally have a strong character for a fairly low cost. Players who bid too high are playing at a disadvantage, but it was their decision to bid as high as they did. A couple players have a strong character for 0, which was lucky, but they did so only because they took the risk of having a weak character instead.
Also, responding to shock's post from the R1 thread, since I think it's more fitting in this thread:
I'm requesting that all of my future matches get played on OETG vanilla.
I'll allow this unless one of your opponents disagrees with it and provides me a compelling reason. Desyncs are quite annoying to deal with and can skew the odds in favor of certain decks, or just increase the overall affect of RNG. That being said, having your sig card be SOPA was completely your decision when you bid all 0s.