They're giving a huge industrial edge to whoever wins 3rd prize and allowing them to create the best items in the game that others have been working toward for a long time. 3rd prize has a value of over 15-20 billion nic while 2nd prize is worth a mere 600-700 mill nic.
Here's what i'd pick for 3rd prize
2x T4 fast extractor nexus
2x T4 industrial nexus
1x T4 recharger nexus
1x T4 medium remote armor repairer
3x T4 medium miner module
1x T4 medium harvester module
They will want to make as much as they can from each CT they get from the reverse engineer, so it's to be expected that they will continue to build until the CT efficency is right down to 10-20%. Hey, the devs even threw in 10x free level 10 decoders, it's like they wanted you to do this, they had it planned out.
Assuming they build about 150 T4 modules from each CT and sell each module from around 5 to 20 mill each. (20m for t4 nexus modules) 5m for miners/harvesters and 10m for T4 remote repairers, they're looking at earning about 15-20+ billion nic.
Hey, they could use some of that to buy all of the 1st and 2nd prizes from the winnings and still have loads of nic left afterward.
Very poorly thought out 3rd prize, not only doing it grant insane riches to the 3rd prize winner, and not only is it backward that 3rd prize is better than 1st and 2nd by a mile, but it also *** over us industrial types, some of us have been playing this game for a year now, hoping to one day be the first to produce some of these high end as of yet unavailable T4 items. This whole prize buggers that, market will be saturated, not much of a player driven market when a tournament gives such rewards.