I wanted to share this post here after initially posting on in our Beta Lounge:
This is the final version of Hero Academy for V30. I want to be transparent about our thinking behind the feature.
We have read all of your feedback and recognize that we need to figure out a way to improve the quality of life for players regarding duplicate Heroes. At the moment, there is no truly rewarding way for retiring Heroes and Hero Academy is not solving the issue. It is our opinion that the solution should not be the last tier of an Advanced building, something that a very small group of players would be able to benefit from. Instead, we would like to, at some point down the line find a better way to solve the problem so that it would be accessible to a wider range of players.
The reason we are releasing the Hero Academy now is that we sincerely believe it does provide real value to the players, despite not addressing this specific issue.