Alright so, i was told that intiative passes were really powerful and not everyone has them, the problem is, most of the monsters that my group seems to fight have 2 or 3, there was a fight that we were in, had 5 earth elementals and 1 vampire-esk ghoul thing, these elementals only job was to trap us down in the ground, and they had 3 intiative passes so we were pretty screwed cause everyone in my group only had 2 besides our gunbunny, who got lucky went 1st and head shotted the vampire that was controlling them

So is it true that alot of people have 3 or 4 passes or was it just a bad encounter

When the summoner of a spirit dies, typically that spirit just goes back to the metaplanes, unless it happens to go free.

Spirits are pretty nasty, and vampires are fairly up there on the Big Bad Evil Guy list. So, I'm not surprised that encounter was tough. By "not everyone has them" it means, your average joe wageslave, johnny student, and jane doe don't. Even the rent-a-cop probably doesn't (but might pack some combat drugs).

You only really need to worry about IPs from people worth killing. So....

Against many critters and "peer" type NPCs you'll run into multiple initiative passes.

In SR4 though the extra passes come later though. Meaning that they often won't come into play since it's pretty easy in SR to get taken down in the first initiative pass. You initiative score matters a whole lot there. Also you have to give something up for those extra passes (I.e. instead of wire 2 you could have gotten a whole pile of defensive cyberware).

So I think it's reasonably balanced in SR4.

They are nice though.