Brother just started raving about how they were going to be making some mechanics changes over the next couple of days, from what I understood the following may or may not happen;
Removal of "Armour Penetration" on weapons. Single damage modifier & attack speed.
Monsters have variable health as opposed to armour values.
10 levels of difficult as opposed to 100 (I gather that this is the level value of enemies) apparently there will be 10 tiers with 3 tiers inside. The top tier is the lowest tier of the next.
Character wipe. (Probably be able to save your character files somehow since they're local, not sure if it'll work, I'd put some sort of marker on new new characters.)
There we some other things he was talking about but I couldn't quite keep up, I'm going to try and dig up where he read this. Bear with me.
EDIT:
http://playstarbound.com/coming-in-a-few-days-sorry-for-the-delay/I can only assume that's legitimate!
(My Brother, not the starbound website)
Breakdown;
"We’re going to reduce the number of planet levels from 100, to 10."
"You’ll be able to directly compare weapon DPS which will now appear on the weapons tooltip."
"Armor will become easier to understand and will gain additional buffs, such as increasing player max health."
"remove armor from monsters and simply give more powerful monsters more health"
"Monsters will no longer have a level, instead monsters will be given an easy/medium/hard marker"
"a hard monster in sector 1 will be roughly the same strength as an easy monster in sector 2."
"difficulty of monsters will increase the lower you dig, but so will the rewards."
"Items with a static amount of damage will be manually balanced and useful for the entire sector"
"craft the best armor in a sector, you’ll be in good shape for the next sector."