This is the worst upgrade ever. I have a rather unique strategy that put 1 KP on perhaps 2,000 individual AWs - many of which may never be upgraded. The goal of the 1 KP strategy was primarily to get 5 KPs at some point in the future. It takes a while, but it worked well regularly provide a say 15-30 5 KP instants every day, In Shard mania, my conjecture is that many of those AW were upgraded with Shards without material contributions beyond my one, In any case, I am generating a lot more shards and lots and lots of KP instants. In my fellowship, we generally wait until all chests are taken but that is less true in other fellowships, especially small ones. How many instants am I gaining during Shard Mania? I and currently getting perhaps as many as 3000 Kp in instants each day - I know for a fact that I got 249 "5 KP shards" today as I did not spend them until tonight. The 20s were used throughout the day so they are probably more value than the 5's. Unfortunately, no one in my fellowship (or anyone else) can get any points from these upgrades. I and all my AWs are 100% locked out virtually all the time. This shard mania is just stupid. Meanwhile, I would like to trade KPs within my fellowship. For the first day that worked - very rarely since. Trading is a good team building exercise which would have productively eliminated excess shards without impact outside of fellowships. This option is no longer available - a bad choice. Instead, my shards went first to players in my fellowship and then to neighbors to a lesser extent. Using traded shards was time consuming but 3 or more upgrades were pretty straight forward exercises until I was locked.
Outside of trades, the bidding to get the top position on say a Golden Abyss got out of hand. In my own fellowship (by those outside it), bidding has in some cases gone past 150 KP. What does that mean? Starting players have no chance of getting shards for Golden Abyss and early chapter AWs. This is a horror and I doubt it will ever settle down. Inno really SCREWED low level players. While people should do what is in their interests, the game designers should not design the system to help higher level players to the detriment of low level players. The shards for early chapter AWs by high level players is always going to be very high. So this problem should have been 100% expected.
Since I review 200+ neighbors every day, I can say commonly bids of 45Kp or more are found on early chapter AWs. I have over 500 Golden Abyss Shards. A number I can NEVER spend so bidding up to 45, or even 150, is in my interest to get a return for this excess resource. One answer to the problem is to make the return of using on your own AW HIGHER than for gifts to others. That would have far better incentives for good gaming. Of course, the better solution is to let gifts within fellowships be unlimited or only allow shard contributions within fellowships.
I don't really want all these KPs for shards. They are bad for the game and makes a good game, just too easy for advanced players. I had thought the original plan was to contribute shards for shard based upgrades. That to me made sense. It would have been a good tweak. This one is beyond stupid.