The shard reward is a interesting idea and thought about the same thing but I was also thinking of introducing some sort of point system like the tournaments had for surviving toons.
But the combination of shards doesn't work.
- who gets put last when shards are combined?
- p2p lose advantage so they will pay less
- new players get grouped with old players and don't have the roster to keep up at a meta change
- the current grouping is time based and is probably the only fair way to group.