Forget about building complex flight mechanics with depth where achieving max performance from a ship would take some learning and effort! Now watch yourself lose the turning angles inexorably as your opponent's Legendary Hornet MkII turns an extra 30deg/s at max pitchup! Watch as the pilot makes a mistake and gets under your guns, only for your well aimed burst to shave merely three quarters of the Legendary Hornet MkII's HP because it's somehow BOTH more agile AND made of denser armor!! Statistical superiority in every way! Feel the sting of virtual poverty as you fight the better fight but still lose to someone who has the time or backing to grind themselves a big comfy buffer of Epic and LEGENDARY spreadsheet numbers! Have Care CIG, you're going full Firefall with this. If Tiering is made Horizontal, with every stat specialization coming at a tradeoff penalty elsewhere.. Then you get a whole different bag of problems with meta and balance, but it would still be infinitely better than Lv1 Hornet vs Lv100. Let the Tier system instead let us make interesting choices, such as changing the role of a ship into something other than its OEM one. Such as by turning Brawlers into Interceptors (@angelarch for the discussion) or Short Range fighters into very long range ones, at a tradeoff. What would a Redeemer look like, specialized into Signature Reductions, becoming a stealthy heavy gunship at the expense of its ability to sustain very long bursts of fire on a target? These are the kinds of deep customization we should be getting instead of straight levelups.