I'd much rather stick with the devil that I know vs. the one that I don't. Any system is going to have drawbacks. You get a lot more players quitting when there are large disruptions to the game than keeping status quo and that would be a huge one. As a player on a Nov '15 shard, which means coming up on 2 years now, I have no interest in making arena harder or require more time to get the same reward for doing the same activity; that seems pointless.
What I'd prefer they do is add more content, like the territory battles, to make the game fun and rewarding.
Many of the old shards don't even "collude" necessarily in a way that's punitive to other players, they just share payout slots and actually cooperate to not fight each other. What's wrong with 3-5 people that are in a certain payout agreeing to rotate slots with each other rather than slit their own throats?
If you really want to end collusion...than don't collude! :) Invite that player in to the shard rotation.
