Math for Giving Shards for Ranking and Prestige
My opinion is that Shards should be granted to players both for prestiging a character (resetting them to level 1 after reaching level 50) as well as for your rank at the end of each season. This is an easy to understand reward system that encourages continued play.
First, please note that shards (and bloodpoints) are an example of SOFT CURRENCY. This means that they are awarded in-game. This is distinguished from HARD CURRENCY which is tied directly to a real-world money amount and represents an externalized economy. In Dead by Daylight, Auric cells are the Hard Currency that come from outside the game.
This distinction is important because a Soft Currency can be awarded by a development team entirely at their discretion. It has no monetary value. Instead, it's value is tied to HOW MUCH GAME TIME a player has invested.
This is why Player Level is used to award shards in the current system.
Got it?
OK, from the Dead by Daylight Wiki, we can see how many shards are currently awarded for leveling up. If you level up to 100, you will receive a total of 25,220 shards - which is estimated to require approximately 579 games. Quite a lot!
This works out to an average of a little more than 40 shards earned per game played.
With this number in hand, we can make a quick estimate of how many additional shards should be awarded for prestiging. If we estimate that it takes about 100 games to fully buy out a bloodweb (this is just a ballpark estimate, remember!), multiply that by 40, we get 4000 shards.
So, in addition to the normal rewards for prestiging (bloody clothing), also granting the player 4000 shards remains in line with the existing economy.
Determining a fair amount of shards for end of season rank is much trickier because rank should reflect a player's skill at either survivor or killer. (As it stands there are ZERO rewards for your end of season rank - it's just a number used to seed your matches).
My recommendation here would be to treat end of season rank as a non-linear award structure with bigger rewards at the highest ranks thereby encouraging players to try and climb the ladder and then rewarding them for doing so.
To keep the numbers simple, I'd recommend starting at the top and using that 100 game estimate for prestiging as a representation of the effort required to reach rank 1 and then by dividing it into two parts - 50 game for survivor and 50 for killer.
Or, in other words, A rank 1 survivor and a rank 1 killer would each get 2000 shards at the end of a season.
From there, the awards drop off sharply by rank. Maybe 45 games worth (1800 shards) at rank 2, 40 games worth (1600) at rank 3, 38 games worth (1520) at rank 4, and so on down the line. At the bottom of the curve the rank 15's might only get 5 games worth (200 shards) because the intent is to create a curve of rewards that is top heavy. Below rank 15 may not receive any shard rewards.
In the end, I recognize that this is all just speculation, but I thought it was worthwhile to throw some numbers out there to show that the current economy works out to be roughly:
<< 40 shards awarded per game played >>
And that this number could be used as a starting point for awarding shards in other areas of the game that currently lack a much-needed award structure.