Where everyone says people pop over to say, Indom, farm up with 4x XP then transfer back to Excel. If a "special rewards" character was shard locked, nobody would do this. The point of more xp was to incentivize folks to play on lower pop servers, even if only part time. My thought is if you could have some alts on a lower pop server that get some nice rewards for being there, you'd play them at least some of the time. This would have shards see more traffic at times and possibly hook some into staying full time.