I am part of this ship shard and since the latest update have decided to go full F2P.
The reason is simple. As stated in the post above, this shard harbours hundreds of extremely active players. If I ask around in my guild, I can tell you for certain, that my fleet would easily camp in the top 50 (probably much higher) in other shards with players who played longer than I have. In the current shard, I have to sometimes buy a refresh to even remain in the top 500.
As an example, you can see that at place 239 there was a 400k+ fleet only shortly after they released the packs:
https://imgur.com/a/LjRk3This shard is extremely competitive, and with the recent introduction of crystals, also very unfair, I think.I have written a complaint on this already quite some time ago (directly to support), but the messages were ignored. If anyone can come up with a reasonably good way to statistically document this unfair shard, please let me know. I will be happy to ask around and collect data.