From seeing people's various stances on the recent changes, I have come to a proposal. Currently, the motivation to explore other planets for many people comes from other planets having Better Stuff (tm), and so the recent change makes it unclear which planets have Better Stuff, but digging down in your current planet does. They feel like the exploration has been limited. Other people are happy just exploring the variety within those worlds, regardless of whether it is helping them advance or if they are just finding a cool city. Others like the changes because it encourages a deeper exploration of a planet, rather than a surface skim. So here is my proposal, which should cater to all of these playstyles. Include more resources, which are not better than each other, but are needed in combination. These resources are not found on all planets, they are scattered. Explore this planet here to to some of this resource, explore another to get that resource, then use them both to make better equipment. You now need to explore several planets to advance, rather than only digging deep on your one planet, but you need to do more than arrive at a high level planet and steal a good weapon to roflstomp everything. Some resource should still be found basically everywhere (coal being the main example, for hopefully obvious reasons) Different sectors can have different sets of these resources to work with.
I expanded on this in another post on this thread http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/star-map-tiers-are-lame.48688/ "I also like this idea. The progression system would need reworked, but I think it could use it anyways. First thing I suggest is have planets be rarer the higher tier they are, and consequently spaced further apart. So, hoping around to tier 1 planets is easy, but going between tier 10 planets requires huge jumps. Make it so you can remotely tell the tier, and filter out the stars of a given tier, to simply the process of clicking at a thousand planets trying to find one of the tier you want. Part of the progression should be access to higher quality fuels, and/or ship upgrades to be more efficient, so as you progress through the game those distances are more tractable. You can also have sensor upgrades which expand the region you can look at. So, you will have a hard time even finding higher tier planets until you upgrade the scanner. This will create a much greater expansion of the effective scope of the universe, which will give a feeling of progression to it. Skipping ahead in tiers becomes harder since it requires you to gather far more fuel to reach those planets, in general. Next, make it so you need to work with several planets of a tier to get upgrades. Have ores and other resources that are not on every planet, so you have to combine the resources from several worlds to get better gear and upgrades. This can also encourage setting up a base at a planet with abundant resources you may want to come back to and collect. Rework the weapon and armor progressions. Rather than armor being a pile of one resource and weapons being random drops, have both require a mix of resources to make. Instead of just dropping a legendary weapon, have things drop a legendary component, which can be used to build a weapon of materials of the appropriate tier. This would stop "lets just go raid a weapon from a tier 10 planet and pwn everything", as you will still need to gather tier 10 resources from several worlds to utilize it. However, it still lets you push yourself and go to harder planets for greater rewards. It just shifts it from "go to a higher tier planet to get a better drop" to "If I can operate at a higher tier planets I can get better stuff". Higher tier planets can also have adverse environments that requires better gear to deal with. This will further reduce the availability of higher tier planets you can access, even if you do gun straight for it. Putting all of this together, and you will have a universe you can freely explore, expanding in scope from your beginning, which encourages in depth exploration of many planets at each tier, allows people to calibrate their challenge by operating at easier or harder planets, and get corresponding rewards for it, without making tier jumping a trivial activity. If we still want the bosses acting as gateways, they can do what they do know, in that they give access to better tiers of crafting recipes. Since the equipment will be gating your progression, and you can't just skip past them with drops, you will still need to defeat the bosses to progress. However, it is just a softer barrier, as there is no "you absolutely cannot get past X without beating this boss", but you won't be able to progress indefinitely without them."
