What's the virtue of having a tier three version of a rifle versus a tier one?
TL;DRHigher-tier rifles give better stats and, at the highest tiers, material choices that trade a buff for a debuff so players can focus a favoured stat; examples are planned before upgrading arrives.
There's another question on the list that alludes to this. Well, one of the things is that not only can you get more stats, but you can get more options. So there'll be a material that you can have either different types of or different qualities of that will provide a tradeoff between a buff and a debuff. So you can really lean into one stat that you really like if you want to.
So not only will the stats get generally better if you increase the tiers, but in the highest tiers you will even be able to affect or focus on a certain stat, with the downside of affecting another stat in a negative way.
Chris is really interested in that kind of trade-off, a plus and a minus when you're crafting, having that choice. So even though we're planning to do that definitely for the higher tiers, since we want to start iterating on that earlier, we're going to try and come up with some examples of that before we get to the actual upgrading.