Dear Devs, please change the Races!

Rivals Races are a feature that exists for a few months and comes in two forms:

1. Most players get slotted into a group of 10 players with similar medals. They all "race" to the highest medal count in a 3-day period. #1 gets a Colossal chest, lower significantly worse.
2. Top100 players get their own race. The Top20 get 2 Collossal crates each, 20-40 get 4 Epics and so forth.

This is a lot of free rewards, which in general isn't a bad thing. But there's two fundamental problems:

1. The variant for most players sets a strong incentive to deliberately aim to have fewer medals to get an easier race. Players achieve this by playing less outside of races, or by deliberately losing matches. Both are perverse incentives that are making the experience worse for all players, and are not in the interests of the developers.
2. If you get into the Top20, the Top100 race is great. 8-10 free Colossal crates. The issue: This is so much easier if you have L14/15 decks. For example, I landed in both Top20s in nearly all of the last two months' races. So I got 20 Colossal crates for free, whereas for strong players with L12 decks like VictorBansemer, it's really hard to get into the Top20 (even though he's a much better player than me). So they are punished for landing in the other parts of Top100, as the single Colossal crate of a normal 10-player race would be better rewards.

How could this be fixed without huge changes to the code? Some ideas:

1. Reduce the rewards for the Races overall, and reallocate these rewards to other areas (see further below). 
2. To compensate for the reduced overall rewards, increase rewards in other areas such as:
• Improve rewards for the first 10-20 games (or wins) each day. That is what the races intended to do: Make players more active.
• Increase rewards for events, or add an additional event per month. 
3. Re-introduce vanity items as rewards for the #1 spots and Top20 (instead of Colossal crates). At the same time, bring these vanity items back to the shop.
4. Publish the Top100 on the official EA Rivals page each month to give especially the #1 some limelight.

The effect of this would be to remove the perverse incentives, and create positive incentives instead. Maybe some of the suggestions are a bit tricky to realize, but I bet some form of them is viable without a lot of development time.

An alternative option would be to change the races so that they don't work on medals, but on the # of wins. This would also reduce the tanking, and even increase the "play more ladder" incentive of the races.