1000 shards equals as generous.... I think your developers made "another" mistake and missed out more numbers, maybe an 100,000 would keep some players. You only have to go into global lately to see how unhappy players are.
With most things dropping alien pieces and most players having thousands of them, is it not time to look at changing some of the new components into other things? Or even add them to daily quests instead of alien pieces.
What I mean is say you have 1500 energy and the attack is 1480 it doesn't let you do a full chain attack, it will let you do anything lower than the full chain.