Everyone who participates, whether they work at it or just piddle at it gets the reward.
From what I have understood, there is 4 rewards from a simple decorative sash to some nice sleeves with good and fight affecting mods....
Now, my understanding is that not everyone wh0 participated and turned in cures will be able to get up to the 4th and best reward. Only those players who turned in the most cures will get the best rewards and all those players who turned in a lower number of cures will need to be compared to the "top" turning in players and if their number of cures is too below the top ones for that shard, they will only get a sash if at all....
Those players who turned in the most cures, I seem to understand, will even get all 4 rewards in one shot.
Now, unless I got it all wrong, a system as the above basically tells to players not having enough time to even try to compete with powergamers, players with garden beds and so forth, not to bother participating and spend their available (little) time to play Ultima Online doing else because their realistic chances to get anything past a sash are very low.
That's at least my understanding of how it works.
Now, if I am correct, I can't see this as a good system for Ultima Online as displeasing paying customers, I think, does not help much keeping their accounts as active..... Now, I am not saying that rewards should be handled on a silver platter at all, I am just saying that I would have much more favoured a system with a set number of cures for each reward.
For example, 50 cures turned in for each reward. In order to get reward 2 players should get first reward 1 and so forth. That is, I would have liked more a system where any and ALL players would have known that by working their time to turn in 200 cures total, this would have earned them all 4 rewards.
Want to limit the number of rewards per shard ? Then limit them to 1 type of reward per character or even 1 type of reward per account/shard if needed.
But definately, I would have much more preferred that players could have known FOR SURE that by turning in X cures they could have gotten the 4 rewards and not this unpredictable situation where some players might have done some work and see hardly anything only because on their shard some players turned in hundreds upon hundreds of cures thus leaving their tally far behind and causing them to loose any realistic chance at any good rewards.
That's at least as I see it.