I hit tier 10 armor and weapons earlier today, and it makes running around on TL 10 worlds a breeze... but I feel like there's not much point to exploring TL 10 worlds. I don't need new gear. There's no content on TL 10 that I can't find elsewhere. What I'd like to see is for each threat level to have a few things that can't be found on any other threat level, and some things common to each level can change as you move through the tiers. For example, maybe at TL 1, villages could all be sort of rural farming communities. By the time you get to TL 5, you're finding bustling cities prospering on rich ore veins. Then, as you get closer to TL 10, those cities get smaller and more fortified - after all, TL 10 is dangerous and needs lots of guards and maybe walls or a dome to keep mobs out. Naturally, TL 10 settlements should be defending something of importance that gives it a reason for being there. Maybe it's the only pool of water on an Arid world. Maybe it's a room with several Tech chests guarded by someone that turns hostile if you get too close (forcing you to fight your way out of the settlement if you want to loot them). Or maybe a more broad approach could be taken, restricting entire world types to certain tiers. Perhaps Tentacle worlds might be a TL 7-and-up thing, while idyllic grasslands could be a low-TL occurrence with forests and jungles in all TLs. In any case, tier-gating aside, there should be more of a point to exploring in each tier than there is. It feels like the smart thing right now is to rush to tier 10 gear, then spend the rest of the game puttering around in tier 3 and lower where nothing can meaningfully hurt you except for lava, and that's simply quite silly.
Found a UCSM installation on a lvl 10 tentacle world. I know these things are 100% random, but it felt totally appropriate and got me thinking "what ARE they doing here". It's been made pretty obvious that end-game content isn't fleshed out. I don't think tier-gating all the way to the end is going to solve these problems though. If they do stay with the tiered approach, I hope that the carrots for finishing tier 10 worlds are vanity items. Otherwise they'll get trivialized pretty quickly.
I know the end tiers aren't fleshed out... that's part of why I put this in the Suggestions forum, since it's meant to be a possible way to flesh them out. My point is just that as cool as it may be to find a UCSM installation on a tentacle world in TL 10 might be, there's also probably hundreds of TL 1 tentacle worlds with UCSM installations on them. The only things higher TL worlds have that lower tier worlds don't are high-tier weapons. Tech, cosmetic items, dungeons, villages, biomes... all of it can be found in roughly the same combinations and seemingly the same frequency in each TL. The game hinges a lot of its notion of "progress" in terms of moving from entry-level planets to planets that are much harder to survive on. Naturally, the incentive structure should be set up so that once you've progressed to that point you have some reasons to stay there. For some people, new cosmetic items that can't be found at lower tiers may very well be enough. For me? Item hoarding is fun, but a lot of what appealed to me about the game in the first place is the fact that you can pick a point of light on the star map and say "man, I wonder what cool stuff I can find there". The real incentive for me to keep exploring is all the stuff that I might be able to encounter like villages and weird anomalies, and knowing that there are things to encounter in TL 10 that the lower TLs simply don't have (say, crashed spaceships with leaking reactors lots of chests or maybe extra Apex storage lockers that you could loot defended by extremely tough mobs mutated by the leaking radiation, not to mention the place being a huge environmental hazard in general) would really be the only thing that would keep me playing the game after having done everything else.
