Just got the game installed it....

Say's in patcher "No shards found.  You have a ticket with 0 permission pairs, but no shards were found"

What does this mean?  I've paid for a month and everything...

 i've read somewhere its a complicated thing with champions online, you need to activate your free 30 days first on your account page or something 

Momodig, I've had the same problem, but I've got a fix if you've got the same issue. "No Shards Found. You have a ticket with zero permission pairs, but no shards were found"  actually seems to mean "No Subscription Found" -- what idiot though that was a clear error message?

I did the same as you, I entered my retail key and credit card details and thought I'd subscribed, but apparently it didn't work even though there was no message to show it.  To check this, log onto the Champions Online site, go to 'My Account' and if the Dashboard says 'No Product' then your subscription didn't work.

Repeating the subscribing should fix it (it did for me), and I'm hoping with no double billing.

However... think very hard about activating your subscription right now because I think you will immediately hit a new problem:  Once I got the subscription fixed then the patcher tries to update the client, but fails.  It starts for a few seconds (shows 'Patching...') but there is no network activity and it times-out after 60 seconds saying 'Error 14: The connection to the server was lost' -- there's no auto-retry, so you have to sit at the screen re-hitting the 'Patch' icon, and endlessly watch it fail again, and again and again.  I tried for a couple of hours -- about 80 goes I estimate, been occasionally trying since then in case the patch server was down.  No success -- its now been three days, and I still haven't even seen the start-up screen lol.

In my opinion the CO launcher/patcher is broken, for me at least, and I don't know how to proceed (my support tickets have been ignored).  If I were you I'd wait a while before subscribing -- or like me give-up and subscribe to something else.