Tyrannis Minerapocalypse Dev Blog

CCP officially responded to the insurance changes with a dev blog, and I can say I feel pretty good about what I've seen so far.

• The insurance rates will now be dynamic recomputed based upon market prices for the commodities used to build ships, the payout you get may change over the lifetime of the insurance contract (assuming your ship lives long enough)
• A number of steps are being taken to reduce the supply of minerals from secondary sources, the loots tables will be getting tweaked to replace some Tech 1 loot with scrap metal and faction tags
• Drone compounds are being rebalanced to return more low end minerals. Plush compound is now even more awesome for mineral compression than it was before with a 50:1 compression ratio. Shame there's no Plush Compound BPO....
• Mid range asteroid ores which appear in lowsec are getting a boost to the production of low-end minerals, with the intention of balancing the spread of ores and making those midrange rocks worth mining again.
• Insurance rates for different ship types are getting tweaked, T2 ships in general will be buffed while supercaps are going to find the default insurance rates dropped to <10%

There's a bit of speculation going on, particularly among Zydrine and Megacyte which have seen their values drop significantly in the last year. Personally I wish there were a mineral futures market because I could short sell those low ends minerals that are likely to drop in value even before the Tyrannis update drops.

Oh what a noob I was....

It's almost two years since I started playing Eve and while I now have something of a reputation regarding my broad knowledge of the game, but it's not something that happened overnight and while I did a few things right I made a lot of 'mistakes'.

.When illectroculus was created it was primarily because there was a special offer on steam that gave me a 21 day free trial and I'd seen the tv ads which had been playing during battlestar gallactica. I'd previously tried a 14 day trial but had been too busy with the kids to take it beyond the basic tutorial, so I signed up for the extended trial.

Mistake #1 was doing this on the same day as Empyrean Age was released (I guess that's why CCP PR had gone on the marketing blitz with TV commercials), so I couldn't even login, and my first 24 hours of account time were essentially spent trying to get logged in, but I didn't yet understand the skill training system so I wasn't all mad about missing all that training time.
Lesson Learned: Patchday = Downtime, Have a long Skill training.

When I created my pilot I had no idea how the races or attributes worked, so I pretty much chose a race and bloodline entirely on being able to create an avatar that looked like my real self - so a Caldari Civre Male. And at the time I chose the 'Prospector' background, the first step on a career in mining and industry. Until Apocrypha was released almost a year later I had 'experts' with Caldari-Achura avatars telling me I'd made a huge mistake..... not so much any more.

Mistake #2 was when I took those 5 customizable attribute points I had and use them to balance out my starting stats, leaving myself with the 8,8,8,8,7 starting attributes that pilots start with these days.
Lesson Learned: Use evemon or other character planners.

Mistake #3 was after I'd run the noob mining tutorial and had a shiny new Bantam frigate. I looked for some new missions and found an agent in a nearby system who gave me my first level 1 mission - 'Worlds Collide'. I set my bantam up with a Civilian Afterburner, Civilian Shield booster and a 75mm Railgun loaded with 100 rounds of lead ammo. Shortly after arriving and trying to run between the gates I received my first lossmail, so I can forever see how much of a noob I was.
Lesson Learned: Even easy missions can't be done in a failfit mining frigate.

Mistake #4, was when I looked at bigger and better ships, I 'upgraded' to a Cormorant destroyer because I thought it would be a good mining platform, with a larger cargo bay and more turret slots for mining lasers. I completely failed to understand ship bonuses and didn't appreciate that the bantam did an awesome job at sucking down ore (actually bantams are good at sucking at everything). I mined in that cormorant for a long time before I upgraded to an Osprey.
Lesson Learned: Ships have bonuses, learn to use them.

Mistake #5, was when I started training railgun skills to make that cormorant a decent mission runner. I ignored any missile training, after all, the ships I'd used were all turret based - the Ibis, Bantam, Cormorant, Osprey. I didn't train any missile skills seriously for a long time.
Lesson Learned: Missiles are a lot easier than guns.

Mistake #6, was buying a Ferox long before I was able to fly it with any serious ability, I tried a couple of level 2 missions in it and found that my Cormorant was vastly more effective (duh!). I still didn't have any drone skills so I was shooting at frigates with medium guns and the one missile launcher I'd put on to fill out that last slot. The Ferox got left in storage for a while....
Lesson Learned: Using a ship is not the same as being able to fly the ship.

Mistake #7, was using Giant Secure cans for mining without anchoring them first, which meant that another pilot came along in a hauler and stole my ore. So I used my Osprey's missile launcher to shoot at his badger and he warped off because I didn't have a warp disruptor. Figuring that I getter grab my ore I flew back to station and grabbed my badger and warped back to my cans, and to his Kestrel, which did in fact have a warp disruptor. The single gun on my badger didn't help me one bit. However, I did switch into a cormorant and come back with guns blazing, this time the fight went my w ay very quickly and he warped off to station, I gave chase and managed to kill his kestrel as he was waiting for his aggression timer to expire. So, my first PVP loss and kill happened, and I realised that PVP was thrilling in a way that I'd been missing.
Lesson Learned: Anchor Cans, PVP is exciting.

Mistake #8, having figured out how agents worked I'd been progressing up the corporate ladder and was running level 2 missions using my Cormorant, which was now quite capable of sniping those pesky pith pirates. I felt I could take on anything in this, and when I got offered 'Recon (1/3)', for the first time I felt my trusty destroyer would have no problem killing the rats for bonus points. It of course failed badly and taught me to read mission instructions with greater care. For good measure I also apparently had a mixed gun type setup and a Connections skillbook in in my cargo? At least I had the right kind of shield hardener for dealing with Guristas, I was clearly getting a little smarter. But for extra stupidiity points I still lost another couple of ships failing to run between gates and instead waited until downtime to let the enemies reset. I also remember running the toxic cloud in Recon 3/3 using the ferox with shield and armor tank, just for good measure.
Lesson Learned: Keep mission objectives in mind. Destroyers have paper thin tanks.

Mistake #9, the corp I'd join had had a couple of war decs already but I'd failed to have any direct contact with any of the aggressors, so when another came along it was business as usual. Business clearly being moving an empty hauler from my base in Lonetrek down to the new base in Tash-Murkon. The hauler was cheap, but the implants from the pod set me back 50million. Doh!
Lesson Learned: Autopilot during wardecs is a bad idea.

Mistake #10, took a short cut through lowsec in my Ferox, lost it to a gatecamp. I had a full rack of warp core stabs... in my hold.
Lesson Learned: never be in too much of a rush.

Now, around this time I thought I might take some time off... say in november, I had heard about ghost training, and decided I could get Battleship V training before my account was suspended. It wasn't really a mistake so much as it was a case of unfortunate timing when CCP nerfed the ghost training days after I'd hatched this plan. I had Caldari battleship 3 by this point, and access to s ome level 4 agents, so I saved up and moved from a Ferox to a Rokh, not the best mission battleship by any means but it taught me the usefulness of drones, and how to warp around grid and snipe targets. So not really a mistake, but it highlights how I managed to become a railgun focussed Caldari pilot, the Ibis really needs to have missile hardpoints.

Mistake #11, I'd been moving some stuff back and forth between 0.0 and hi-sec and wanted a better hauler, I realised I had the pre-reqs for the Transport Ships skillbook that would let m e fly blockade runn ers. This was pre-Quantum Rise so they just had higher agility ad built in warp core strength. Nonetheless, I trained the skill, bought a Crane in Jita and then realised I needed to also have Caldari Industrial V to fly it. The upside was that the change to Blockade runners was announced soon afterwards and I was able to sell my ship for 150% of the price I paid for it when QR launched.
Lesson Learned: Some ships have multiple Pre-Requisites.

Mistake #12, lost a hulk mining inside a mission in lowsec, I still hadn't learned about probes or directional scan. I did a lot of AFK mining in a hulk and realised I was getting some nice drops from the pirate rats, so I figured the drops in lowsec would be more profitable. It worked for a couple of days, then I got scanned down....
Lesson Learned: 'Safe Spots' needs to be in quotes.

Mistake #13, undocked from a station in a covert ops when war targets were camping the station. Even frigates align time is long enough for an enemy to lock you when you're not turning from a standing start.
Lesson Learned: Instawarp bookmarks are a lifesaver.

Mistake #14, Jumped into a wormhole, watched exit collapse, ended up scanning a route back to normal space 30 jumps deep inside the drone regions.
Lession Learned: It's not just other players who you shouldn't trust.

Mistake #15, went on a roam with some very expensive faction & t2 battleships, I was the sole tackler in the fleet flying a raptor. I had a friend in fleet who would apply remote sensor boosters to help me lock targets. I missed several easy kills because I had autolock turned on and kept locking and scramming my friend while the red escaped.
Lesson Learned: Disable autolock... always.



Final Mistake Writing this.
No lesson learned here.

The GTFO Maneuver

One of the first things you should learn about combat in Eve is that the only guaranteed move that will keep you safe is the GTFO maneuver, warping off to a station or POS is the most reliable way to deal with a bad situation. Or just picking a random celestial and warping towards it will save your ship, especially if it's only NPC's that are laying the hurt on you since they won't give chase. Once you're in warp you're essentially untouchable, which means that a would be pirate wants to kill your ship then they have to stop you warping off to safety - hence the existence of an array of high tech gizmos designed to stop other ships from warping off. Warp Disruptors and Warp Scramblers are an essential tool for any PVP pilots, be they pirates, militia or warlords in 0.0.

1. Dock At A Station, usually the one you just undocked from and realised that there's a bunch of hostiles waiting on the undock point. If you're unlucky the station will have already spat you out beyond docking radius, and you need to slowboat back into range. EIther way, you have to wait at least 30 seconds before you redock, and if you shoot at anyone then the docking manager will leave you outside until you stop shooting for 60 seconds.
2. Jump Through A Nearby Gate it's pretty common that you'll get the OhShitIt'sAGateCamp feeling moments before you get the OhShitICan'tWarp experience. You'll have 30 seconds of cloak, and a gate that's 12km away which if frequently the fastest way out, but don't be impatient, the gate won't accept you right way because of session timers, so take a few deep breaths before gunning at the gate. Again there's also a 60 second aggression timer, so don't do anything other than gun for the gate.
3. Warp Core Stabilizers are modules that take up low slots, these will counteract the effects of a warp disruptor, but you may need more than one of these depending on what the enemy is using, and they're completely ineffective against interdictors. However warp core stabilizers seriously nerf your ability to lock targets which really makes doing anything other than the GTFO maneuver a pain.
4. Move beyond warp disruptor range, If you're faster than the enemy then you can try running, Warp scramblers are pretty short range, typically less than 10km, Disruptors are good out to 25km or more for some ships.
5. Get Out Of Targeting Range and the enemy will be unable to keep you locked. There are very few cases where a warp disruptor will have longer range than a ships sensors, but applying sensor dampeners to an enemy can cut down their range quite significantly.
6. ECM can be used to break the enemies lock on you completely, either in the form of directed ECM, an ECM burst or ECM drones, it might take a few cycles, but it will work eventually.
7. Energy Neutralizers will suck the tackler's capacitor dry, leaving the enemy without power to keep their jamming equipment running, or maybe just shutting down their MWD for long enough to let you pull range.
8. Kill the ship tackling you, or at least do enough damage to make them perform the GTFO maneuver themselves. This is the first option that occurs to young pilots, but it's also pretty unlikely to work, after all, it's what the enemy is expecting, and they wouldn't have committed to the attack unless they were expecting to prevail.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that this is not something you're going to be able to decide when it happens, odds are you're going to find yourself scrambled and feel helpless, and unless you have friends nearby to help extricate you from your predicament. Options 1 and 2 are frequently forgotten or messed up my pilots who don't know about the various timers that prevent you jumping or docking. Most of the other options require you to have special modules fitted on your ship, which requires a level of planning usually filed away under 'cunning' and #8 sucks because unless you're able to tackle the aggressor he'll run off and you'll miss out on a killmail regardless of how awesome your combat prowess was.

So yeah, there are many ways to try an extricate yourself, but odds are if an enemy has commited to battle you're at a disadvantage, get on the hotline, call in whatever support you can, overheat all your modules, and when your structure is failing you make sure you spam warp to get your pod to safety so you can spend your insurance payout on something other than a new clone and implants.

The Ugly Truth About Learning Skills and Learning Skills

It's best summed up by the CCP dev who when asked about Learning Skills at Fanfest stated that he wished they'd never been put in the game, and that they've yet to come up with any viable idea for removing them from the game without pissing off large sections of the playerbase. So, everyone trains these skills because it increases the value of their gametime, even if it stalls the slow trickle of rewards afforded by training useful skills.

Eve players tend to get obsessed by skills and skillpoints, they're the only comoddity in the game for which there exists no real shortcut to acquiring, you can't buy skillpoints or exchange standing for skills. So anything that makes the acquisition of skills faster is generally considered to be of utmost importance to players, so much so that people make some really bad decisions in the name of maximizing skill training.

• I've heard quite a few pilots invite their friends to a free trial, give them money for skillbooks and then say 'Don't bother playing until you've trained all these learning skills'. Result typically is that the new invitee doesn't play the game, doesn't sign up and then tells all their friends that the game sucks because you need to spend time training skills so you can train skills.
• This thread on Scrapheap Challenge is from a player who created a new alt account and complained that he couldn't get his API key for 72hours (new players don't get website access immediately to limit spammers). As a result he couldn't load his details into EveMon to analyze the optimal plan, and fearful he might waste some of his 200% training bonus on sub optimal skills decided it would be better to let the account sit for 3 days with nothing training at all. Now, I've thrown a 5/4 learning plan into EveMon and no matter how hard I try I can't make a sub optimal plan that takes 3 days longer... This is a perfect case of analysis paralysis.
• There are hordes of carebears who are terribly afraid of pvp because they might lose their expensive implants... but it gets worse, there are pilots who fly in 0.0 and resent jumping into a clone with no implants so they can PVP because they're end up having to train at a slower rate for at least 24 hours.
• There are a ridiculous amount of Caldari-Achura pilots because prior to the release of Apocrypha these characters started off with the lowest Charisma attribute leaving more points in 'useful' attributes. Nowadays the curse of the Achura still lingers, with attribute remaps the Achura pilots are forced to raise their charisma so you find players that refuse to take advatage of remaps for fear of losing the one thing that justified their character choice years ago. IMHO Caldari Achura Males are also cursed with the worst character portraits, and so now you have a whole bunch of players regretting wishing they could change their looks (you can, for a fee, but you can't change race/bloodline, so it'd still be an ugly protrait).

The effort spent in training learning skills takes time to pay off, if you're just starting out, I'd recommend that you train some halfway useful skills first, you should start training your racial frigate skill to level 3 so that you can fly the combat frigate given to you during the tutorial missions and unlock access to the destroyers skill. Gallente should pick up a couple of levels of drone operation, and caldari/minmatar should get some missile training. Get all the upgrades skills at level 1 - Hull Upgrades, Shield Upgrades, Electronic Upgrades, Energy Grid Upgrades, Weapon Upgrades & Afterburner. That will give you access to modules that'll let you build decent ships. You should be able to do all this in 12 hours, and you should use the game's skill queue to manage this, make the 'long' frigate training your long term priority, and then push the shorter skills to the front of the queue so you can take advantage of them sooner. For the tutorials you'll probably have to train astrometrics, Industry and Propulsion Jamming depending on the path, and to be honest I recommend doing them all so that you gain practice and good loot.

Now.... if you feed all those skills into EveMon you'll find that you can take advantage of learning skills to make the Frigate training a little shorter, so go and buy the Iron Will and Spatial awareness skills, train them to level 1 so that your frigate skill comes faster. But forget training more until you can fly a Rifter/Incursus/Punisher/Kestrel, that'll let you run all the tutorial missions, and, you can even do the Sisters of Eve epic mission arc with just those basic skills. (Rookies might need help, but I've been able to solo the whole thing with <80,000sp

While you're running all these missions, making money and most of all having fun you'll be getting some learning skills to make your experience in the long term smoother.

If you feel that you need some new skills for more awesome gizmos then it really doesn't hurt you that much to train them, get some basic cruiser skills if you want to, it'll be the best ship you can fly until you sign up for a full account, and by the time you sign up for a full account you'll probably have a better grasp at the long term effects of the training system and you'll know just how much effort you can bear to expend on the whole learning skills ordeal.

Make Those Deep Safespot Now While You Still Can

Space is big, and so by extension, Eve is big. You may have heard about Other(tm) MMO's where you can walk around the world in under an hour, or if you're being nefarious, you can get some epic monster to chase you from their spawning grounds into some newbie zone and laugh as it tears up the unsuspecting kids before you get punished by GM who also thinks its funny, but is 'just doing his job'. This is not possible in Eve, but don't worry there are many more nefarious things to do in Eve that are full of amusing possibilities, and the GM's won't get mad at you either, unless of course it's been labelled an exploit.

You can travel around 'grid' at conventional speeds where most of the interesting action takes place, you can warp from one grid to another inside a solar system, and you can jump from one system to another via jump gates/portals/bridges or wormholes. In some situations you can fly from one location in system to another without warping depending on the distance, your ship's speed and your patience, it's quite possible to build ships that exceed 10km/sec without running out of cap, and there are some stations that are thousands of kilometers apart, there are occasionally reasons to do this kind of thing - generating bookmarks and some fancy grid-fu. However distances inside solar systems are generally measured in Astronomical Units, which in layman's terms is loosely defined as the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 1AU is roughly 150 million kilometers so you'd take a good 6 months to move this far in your speed setup.

So, warp drive is what we use, even the crappy rookie ships can travel around at 3AU/second, that's 1.6 billion billion kilometers per hour, 1500 times the speed of light, so you can cover most distances inside solar systems in under a minute, some ships are even faster than this, but it's rare that it makes a significant difference. The thing about warp drive is that you need a known destination, you can't just point your ship at the second star on the left and go straight on until morning, not least because 'morning' is a hugely subjective term when you're not tied down to the surface of a planet. The game let you warp to known celestials like planets, moons and asteroid belts, your agents will supply you with bookmarks for mission objectives, and you can scan down the locations of some things using probes. If you're part of a fleet you can warp to other pilots in the fleet, which can be a really bad idea if you don't check with them first and find yourself in the middle of a hostile battlefleet that your cloaked associate was observing.

I'm sure you know that you can make bookmarks any time for later use, and the traditional method of creating 'safe spots' is to make a bookmark when your warping between some planets. They're called safe spots because bad guys can't find you there by accident, they have to break out the probes and scan you down, and even then it's possible to cloak your ship or reduce it's scan signature enough to make it invisible to probes. This well known method lets you generate a hard to find spot inside the solar system, however, there's a technique which lets you exploit the emergency warp mechanics and get safe spots anywhere, and with enough effort you an generate a spot 1000+AU from the star.

These super deep safes are important strategic resources because moving capital ships around doesn't work using jump gates like everyone else, capital ships have their own jump drives that propel them instantaneously from one system to another. But such epic feats of navigation are not possible without a cynosuaral beacon, a device that sends a powerful signal that a capital ship can lock onto and jump to, unfortunately it's so powerful that everyone in that destination system sees it, and they can warp to it. Worse, the beacon when activated stays activated for several minutes, and immobilises the host ship making it a sitting duck with a huge flashing sign saying 'here's a sitting duck'. Capital ships are also not known for their agility, once they arrive at their destination they take a long time to get into warp, it's easy for a hostile force to respond to a cyno beacon and tackle whatever is coming through. Super deep safespots buy the incoming fleet time to warp off to another spot before any hostile forces can intercept which is generally considered 'a good thing (tm)'.

So now I've explained all that I'm sure you want to know all about this exploit, well I'm not explaining it again, there's a whole bunch of other places that explain the tricks. The goons published a guide called 'project poseidon', although they recommend using an Anathema, I found that it's more efficient to use a Blockade runner with Hyperspatial Velocity Optimization rigs, and in friendly territory Hulks and Orcas are better still.

Anyway this is no longer the big secret it once was, CCP have decided to fix the 'problem' and so if you try to use the 'logging out in warp' trick on Singularity you'll find that the ship completes the regular warp cycle first before it initiates the emergency warp. No more shall you be able to create these bookmarks beyond the edge of the system. And now there's a question about the bookmarks that already exist, will CCP delete these? Or will they become something of a shadowy commodity increasingly valuable over time as old players leave and take their bookmarks with them?

Tyrannis Teaser Trailer

Didn't generate anything like the 'Spaecships!' level of excitement that the Dominion trailer did amongst my kids, but I'm now counting the days until the release in May.

Things CCP Could Do To Help The Mineral Markets And Keep Miners Happy

CCP Devs have confirmed that the changes to the insurance rates are indeed intentional and a Dev Blog will be forthcoming explaining this. Now most players aren't freaking out yet, even with all the forecasts of doom regarding the inevitable collapse of the mineral market, there's a definite feeling that the system is being heavily exploited and that the miners generating the oversupply of minerals are largely unaware of how much they're supported by insurance fraud.

Insurance isn't the only thing that's messing up the mineral market, and it isn't the only thing that could stand fixing. The people that are fuelling the epic mineralpocalypse threadnought are largely in agreement that the expected insurance changes would be a good thing if they were combined with some other changes to the system. Some even secretly hope that CCP have some of these changes planned for Tyrannis so that there's something to sustain those players who make mining their primary business.

So here's a short list of 'great ideas' that the devs could roll in with the next release.

Loot Refining Nerfs

Mission and ratting loot make up 40% of the mineral supply, the crappy modules get reprocessed and the minerals sold instead. This leads to an oversupply of mid range minerals which means that there's no ore in low-sec which is more profitable that the base ores in hi-sec.

• Reduce Station refine rates for non-industrial NPC corporations: All those caldari Navy plants now only get 35% refine rate leading to a reduction in mineral output. Players can move loot to other stations for re-processing, but then they need high standings or they get hit with the 5% mineral tax. Besides most players are lazy and will just take the hit. Feasbility: Easy No real code changes, just a bunch of database entries.
• Remove all T1 Loot: Plain Tech 1 items frequently refine into more minerals than the meta version, so only dropping meta 1-4 items would reduce the amount of minerals coming from missions. Feasability: Moderately Easy, Update all the loot tables.
• Replace Meta Loot With Broken Items: to make a broken named item work you combine it with the Tech 1 item and blueprint. The broken items can't really be reprocessed into anything meaningful, so they're no longer a source of minerals, and manufacturing the named items generates more demand from the mineral market. Feasability: Complicated, needs new production paths for all tech 1 blueprints, and new items in the database corresponding to every meta item, and all the loot tables need updated.
• Remove Perfect Refine Rates From Module Reprocessing: with good skills and a god station you can get every mineral out of a module that was put into making it. This could be adjusted so that it's no longer possible to recover everything, alternatively there could be different return rates for different components so that it's harder to recover high end minerals from modules. Feasability: Moderate, needs code changes and database updates to differentiate which items can be refined perfectly.

Anti Macro Measures

There's always a perception that there are a whole bunch of macro mining bots out there ruining the market for the honest players, ergo, any anti macro measure is particularly good for miners. (note that there are clearly plenty of isk farmers running courier bots in magnates around hi-sec, or macro-ratters in 0.0, mining isn't the only thing that easy to automate).

• Fake Ores In Belts: We've seen Barren Asteroids and Fools Crokite in missions so extend these to belts and make them mineable for worthless ore. Have one false asteroid type for each real ore asteroid and they'll get mixed up on the overview. Unless the bot is smart enough to read the overview it will end up mining worthless ore, many bots simply repeat the same set of mouse actions in a loop. Alternatively, don't remove asteroids when they become 'barren' simply leave them there and let bots try and fail to mine these rocks. Feasability: Moderate, Need new objects for the worthless asteroids and ores, the existing asteroid models can still be used. Belts need to be re-seeded to include the fake rocks.
• Nerf Respawn In Static Belts, Move More Mining Into Exploration Sites: Because the perception is that people running macros are too lazy to scan down sites, so the miners who work at it will be rewarded with bigger rocks. As an alternative to exploration, you could make asteroid locations available by talking to agents for mining corporations. You can't kill off static belts completely since they're used as locations for spawning npc pirates. Feasability: easyish, revert the respawn rate changes, add more exploration sites.
• Even More Unholy Raging: ban them alll! Feasability: it's been done before, just keep doing it.

Give Miners Other Things To Do

• Better Mining Missions: Mining missions tend to be interspersed with lots of courier and combat missions, and they tend to take as long as the equivalent level of combat missions but can't pay nearly as well because the loot and bounties aren't there. So, work on those mining missions a bit so that a mining character can essentially be an independent contractor to those dedicated mining corporations. Feasability: easy enough, but I imagine content creators don't dream about creating mining missions.

New Things to Build With The Minerals

All of these NPC manufactured items are cash sinks right now (well we're speculating about the new planetary interaction stuff),

• POS Components: We get blueprints to transform those into the faction variants, how about seeding BPO's for building regular variants to give me something to do with those minerals. This is an established environment, so moving to player generated production wouldn't have to deal with any demand spike due to them being 'teh new hotness'.
• Sov Structures: There's a lot of reasons that IHubs and similar were seeded on the market, there was going to be a huge demand on day one and no chance to ramp up production, plus there was the epic voyage of freighter convoys moving deep into 0.0 only to get hotdropped by Titan pilots playing with their new toys. Seeding blueprints for these would soak up excess minerals, but maybe with the restriction that they still need a special production facility that is only found in NPC stations so that we can still have those freighter convoys.
• Planetary Interaction Widgets: they'll probably be seeded on the market on day one, simply because there'll be a huge demand, but, I can dream about building these things from blueprints so that the insurance floor dropping out doesn't mean dropping the whole mineral market with it. Since they're new there's an argument that this would be the most logical way to generate new mineral demand.

I sincerely doubt we'll see any of this in Tyrannis, everything we've seen on the test server points to a re-pricing of the mineral basket and nothing more. The biggest questions are still whether this is a static or dynamic re-pricing, and of course, whether prices will change rapidly enough to open a window for market speculators to make a real killing.