Well, then I must say that these reasons were ill chosen. Its not like Emergence (and the reasons therein) are a god given necessity.

On other words: If the reasoning is: "well, we couldnt release Unwired first, because of Emergence.", why was Emergence designed to be so important in the first place?

All true. Nonetheless, it was the plan to develop technomancers further, give some social and setting context by making them the focus of the first SR4 event/campaign book. When the concept of Emergence was developed it quickly became apparent that we would be introducing a surprise or two that will change the way people in the Sixth World treat the Matrix. Releasing Unwired ahead of Emergence would have ruined some of the surprises we had planned as it's was a given that that any developments or twists we had for technomancers and the rest of the Matrix in Emergence would need to be covered in the Matrix rulebook. Releasing Unwired without including Emergence-relevant material would have been akin to leaving out a major chapter in the corebook and force us to present Matrix rules material somewhere else later - something FanPro has been avoiding, we're trying to keep the number of rulebooks needed to a minimum.

Conveniently, Unwired was slotted to be the last of the core rulebooks, following the plotbook, so no changes to the production schedule were needed.

The point isn't so much the order fluff -> crunch to avoid spoilers...
It's just that the most important part of the rules to really understand and play SR4 comes... last.
This is especially unfortunate if a plot book 'that will change the way people in the Sixth World treat the Matrix' is released and people are left to wait until they actually have the rules to really play it.

ytjis is along the lines of my complaint earlier about not getting enough books out.
as was pointed out to me, in the past fanpro/fasa only put out about 5 books a year, but with the exception tf the rigger book, which heralded the end of an edition usually, the first books put oput were the core books which made the game more playable than the fluff stuff. I'm not arguing that unwired should have come before emergence, just that there needs to be more focus on getting the core books out (combat, cyber/bio/medical, and matrix,) so that we can start having more complete rules to guide us. Obviously, we'll wind up discarding whatever w e feel like and houseruling stuff and bitching upa a storm about how lousy everything is, but a relatively somplete core set of rules would be helpful.

Let's not forget, fourth edition was released at GenCon in August, 2005... and in limited numbers then. It didn't see widespread availability until Q1 2006, so at this point the game is barely over a year old.

I know it can be hard to remember, but there was a lag time between the last edition's core rulebook and its main supplements. SR3 did not "suck" during those long dark months between the BBB and Matrix...

Besides, if they had released Emergence and Unwired before Street Magic then they really would have been ignoring a fundamental part of Shadowrun as a game (the tagline is: "Where Magic Meets Machine!"), and as a fictional universe. Magic is what makes the Sixth World what it is, otherwise we'd all be playing Cyberpunk 2020.

The impact of the Awakening is much more fundamental to the gameworld than advaned computer networking. It is also a much more complex set of rules and ideas.

Actually, Serbitar, I find the Matrix rules work perfectly straight out of the book. My group and I have experimented with one or two alternate systems, including yours, and found all of them flawed, needlessly complex or too similar to prior editions.

The implementation of the Matrix in SR4 is wonderful, you just need to drop the luggage of SR1, 2 and 3.

Bear in mind, I say this as having to date only played one SR4 character: a technomancer built using only the BBB who has amassed north of 60 karma in bimonthly games, and is the only hacker in a party of eight.

The Device Ratings have gaps? They have a hard-as-hell-to-find chart and listing, but I really don't see "gaps."

It's not about Device Rating as a game term, just device rating... the very system devices and programs are rated.

The Agent searching the matrix example above is the most common one... whereas Sprites don't suffer such limits, and therefore, your TM won't run into them.

I'd really like to test that theory that Emergence will placate all the 'We want UnWired!' people, but the fact that Emergence isnt out yet with no estimated date sorta complicates that...

While Unwired won't change (much) rules, I don't think we'll get less house rules after release.

I read that thread, then I read my rulebook... allow me to get my law-student on and start citing:

Well, imagine you have suprise X in Emergence. Unwired should cover everything Matrix related (not only crunch wise, but also fluff wise) and thus also suprise X.

Thus Unwired can not be released before Emergece without spoiling suprise X or leaving an important part, namely suprise X.

My problem is that suprise X can never be good enough to justify not releasing Unwired as the first or second supplemental rulebook (and never the last)

yeah, but that makes personal commlinks harder to hack than big corporate networks. besides which, agents don't take up all that much in the way of resources; there's no reason not to have one on every node, plus a few patrolling ones.

Alright i'm starting this by saying that i havent read the thread in its entirety, i got tired of the "This should have come first" arguments that was flooding it. Books will be out when they come out and in the order their finished regardless of what anyone else may want or think.

Now, as one of the semi-rabble who thought, (and somewhat still do) that SR4's direction was a mistake, i'm learning to enjoy SR4. It allows for teaching the fresh meat a bit quicker and easier since a lot of the people i'm dealing with in teaching the rules have the attention span of a gnat. Personally i had the combat rules for SR3 down by the end of my third game and only needed a cheat sheet for the ranges which i put on my character sheets anyway. Now instead of dealing with variable target numbers, my cheat sheet tells me what the threshold and dice number modification for the range is and not a target number modification.

As i commented when the game was being projected and i was Oh and woh-ing this new format makes it easier to pitch the idea of a game to my LARP friends and convince them to take their WOD games and throw them away, (mainly because they are hating where their fav game is going.) and play SR. So we might see a shift in the buyers who will take and use the old MET books to make SRlarps the thing for conventions.

Finally, a proposal, If Fanpro wants to keep the SR3 die hards in the fold, they might want to consider taking and converting, (or having some freelancers do so) the old adventures numbers from their orriginal settings (SR123) to SR4 and do a mass PDF publication of conversions. Basically say "Look people, you have all these old adventures and dont want to totally frag over your players, so heres the adjusted numbers for the characters and situations in those books."

seriously.

I don't see why FanPro should give a devil rat's hoop over those who are sticking to the old edition.

Cause even if they are sticking with an old edition, they 'might' buy some of the new stuff to use. There's a demand, no matter how small...