(Before anyone starts, yes I'm aware there are countless threads on this subject, and no, I don't care. These are my opinions and I'd prefer they don't get buried and ignored somewhere. Beside, this puppy is long.)

After finally finishing looking things over, doing a couple of conversions, comparing editions, etc. I've come to the following conclusions (in no particular order):

Loves
Edge – Totally fraggin awesome! No more "character X has a double-digit karma pool, so he's effectively god" syndrome
Street Cred/Notoriety/Public Awareness - Finally, some decent and manageable rules for reputation (even if the "household word" level of Public Awareness is set too low)
Recoil - punks with SMGs and assault rifles are now a viable threat
Initiative - now at least you don’t have to have some sort of reflex booster to stand a chance (even a small one) against the ever growing numbers of adepts and cyber-monsters roaming the streets
Summoning & Binding changes - should have been done years ago

Likes
Attribute + Skill Mechanic - more streamlined, simpler, easier
1-1 staging - again, simpler and easier
No more damage levels - nice and easy
Variable condition monitors - better reflects varying endurance levels IMHO
Skill groups - Sort of like a streamlined return to the days when skills had concentrations & specializations
No Force limits when learning spells - At first I didn't like it, but once I realized the reason they did it I came to enjoy the simplicity and potential power of this method
Light/Holdout pistols - now they're actually worthwhile
Beast spirits – Very nice, should have been included ages ago
Common Cost - Another nice little touch that should have been done ages ago, especially for characters that will settle for something less than the 10,000 nuyen a night hooker.

Dislikes (minor gripes)
Character creation - The metatypes cost too much, the attributes cost too much (although they'd be fine if there were only six of them still or the 200 point limit was increased), and the skill groups are prohibitively expensive
The cost of Magic – Magician/mystic adept/adept status is too cheap. GM permission is not an effective control against players whose greatest real world skill is whining.
Contacts – Contacts now cost bp, and face characters (one of the better ideas from SR3) get a kick in the teeth.
Karma woes - Recreating a character from previous editions (with full skills, spells, etc) costs about 1.75x as much karma as the character has actually earned from a 500bp base
Changes to foci - Why? What, all of a sudden all the foci in the world reformated themselves? Please. Game mechanics should support the world (and ideally be "invisible" in the context of the setting), not make senseless changes to it without explanation
Bioware now costs Essence - Like I said above, why the sudden change? At least this one can be partially explained by a rise in the world-wide level of ambient mana
Where have all the deckers gone? - Wired systems still exist, as do jackpoints. A cyberdeck can still be just as good (or maybe slightly less good) as a commlink on the Matrix foodchain. The assumption that all the equipment from previous editions just "disappeared" is shakey at best.
Smartlink II - Like I said above, how does the "improved" version jive with the new standard version
What the Frag? – Paraphrasing what someone (can’t remember who) here on Dumpshock said recently “Fifteen years of frag, and now we’re back to fuck.” I know some people hated SR’s invented slang, but I for one loved it. It’s part of the charm of the setting, part of what makes it feel like it’s 60ish years in the future instead of just next Tuesday.
Pilot Ground Craft – What ever happened to wanting things to sound cool? Bike, Car, etc sounded so much better.
Elemental attack spells are Combat spells again – Will someone please make up your damn minds?
Technomancers – I never liked otaku, but I could live with them. Now, not only are their descendants in the main book (which I can live with), but they don’t even a single damn piece of cyberware to hack the Matrix and they lose Resonance if they implant cybergear (which I can’t). Hmm, what doesn’t add up here? Someone really dropped the continuity ball on this one.
Magical Ambiguity/Generic Spirits – The “one-size-fits-all” approach to magical traditions really irks me. Unless they take the time to expand on the (very real) differences between traditions in future products, a lot of (important!) detail and richness is lost in this approach. Likewise, while I like the idea of similar spirits for everyone (simpler, plus the differences between nature spirits and elementals weren’t that much mechanic-wise to begin with) some flavor is sacrificed with the change. And what about domains? Furthermore, everyone know uses “magic lodges”? Please. I guess all the nuyen spent on three different types of libraries just never existed in the first place, huh?
Mentor Spirits – I lumped this one in the dislike end of things because the negatives are more annoying than the positives are good. I like the idea that the mentor spirits are basically customizable now (making it possible for a healing oriented Grass Snake shaman and a cold-hearted Rattler shaman assassin to both, in essence follow Snake) but why change the traits of well-known and established totems/idols when the revised rules don’t require it? Change simply for the sake of change is dumb.

Hates
Caps on cyber/magi augmented attributes – What the hell? I always thought the purpose of all this cyberware/bioware/magical enhancement was to, you know, make you better than just human. But now, because some twit couldn’t deal with that idea, you stuck with being only 50% better than human. So much for the cyber in cyberpunk.
Caps on skills – So now, all of a sudden, the entire population of the entire world (including dragons and immortal elves that were already bored with life when God started teething) is pidgin-holed into one of seven little categories of skill in every conceivable skill that are static and will never change. "Hey, Mr. Da Vinci, why do you keep studying art? You know you’ll never get any better.” Dumb.
Banishing – What the bloody hoop-luvin hell?!? For 20 years of game time and three editions, banishing could be used to banish a spirit, which is what the name of the skill implies. Now, unless the spirit in question owes services to some magician, the banishing skill – which not more than 5 game years ago was a good way to deal with any spirit – is now totally fragging useless! Isn’t there somebody in the (no doubt) bloated depths of FanPro that gets paid to watch for such blatant fuck-ups? What are those people called again? Oh yeah, editors!
Centering – Lets take an established mechanic, that works a specific way in the setting and has a direct effect on the setting due to the way it works, dumb it down to 1st grade level and rip every last ounce of flavor out it. Good one.
Shielding – Mid-grade initiate + Counterspelling skill 3 or higher + counterspell/power focus + shielding = virtually invulnerable to hostile magic. Yeah, that’s balanced.

Final Score
Loves – 5
Likes – 9
Dislikes – 14
Hates – 5

So, in the end, the bad does outweigh the good but not by much. The points that I love fix major problems in the game. The points I don’t like mostly just boil down to an old dog (me) growling cause someone is trying to change his favorite bone. Furthermore, most of the points that I dislike/hate can easily be house ruled away, and I have a feeling that it won’t take 20+ pages of house rules like SR3 did.

I agree for the most part. I enjoy the concept of the technomancers more than most (despite being a bit of a stretch compared to many of the concepts) and actually find them almost more interesting than the various magic users.

Hahnsoo - Actually, there are free spirits mentioned - ones that go free as a result of a botched Binding. Admitedly a minor point in the core rules, but there nonetheless.

Blakkie - Don't get me wrong, the original mechanic (in all editions) was clumsy at best, but they could have found a better way to do it than they did. Or better yet, leave it untouched until Street Magic comes out (which is, IMO, what they should have done with initiation in general, instead of just covering the subject in a half-assed fashion).

Xenith - They may as well be magicians, with the Resonance loss and all.

Rotbart - That estimation comes from converting a full magician (grade 5 initiate), a magician adept (grade 3 initiate), and a couple of other un-initiated magicians and adepts, so it might be off due to the double whammie of initiation cost + raise Magic cost. I always reserve the right to be wrong.

Blakkie (Centering) - Actually, it's more like 1st edition, getting rid of the Centering (bleaach) "middle man" skill. Besides, it could be rolled simultaneously with the Drain resistance roll (using different colored dice, or just rolling the two "separate" rolls a few inches away from each other, or whatever).

Blakkie (Marketing) - I would, since a) I'm no good with money, and b) I hate marketing guys. But you're right, they're taking a big gamble as it is without the "blitzkreig" method I was advocating.

For what it's worth, my personal reaction to SR4:

Loves:
- The new Matrix rules. And the way that drones have been integrated. And hackable IC. It is beauty refined and crystallized, and if it isn't reverse-converted into the SR3R project, the people in charge of that project need to have their heads examined.

- Initiation, Mystic Adepts, Submersion, Technomancers, Ritual Sorcery, Watchers, Suppresive Fire, Bioware and Athletics rules in the *core* book.

- Unified rules. Range Combat = Melee Combat = Cybercombat = Astral Combat.

- No more weird-ass statistical effects for damage vs. vehicles. Steel Lynx drones are no longer titanium bubbles - impervious to anything but AV, but guaranteed to pop with even the lightest of brushes from AV ammo.


Likes:
- The new dice mechanic.

- The fact that modifiers now act in a sensible, linear way.

- The way that magic has been toned down a bit. The system has been made more class-less (which is good).

- The new spirit summoning rules that make *all* the summoning rules usable by *all* the summoning characters, just like I hoped for back in the day.

- Spirits that have powers determined by the summoner (within reason).

- Magical tradition creation (although the small number of published spirit types means that GM creativity will be called for).

- Much that was broken in SR3 is not in SR4.

- Skill groups.

- Monofilament Chainsaws.

- The fixed game economy, that makes saving up for a cyberware upgrade something conceivable, and no longer makes the average ganger carry the equivalent of several years' worth of crack, booze and whores around in his cyberimplants.

- Edge. What it is and how it can be used is far superior to SR3's Karma Pool. I'd like to see some rules for Team Edge sometime, though.

- I, also, am fond of the reputation-tracking system.


Dislikes:
- The Spirit Reaction stats.

- The effect of the summoning rules, when placed in the hands of a munchkin.

- The loss of the concept of a tactical dice pool that had to be allocated carefully (I don't miss the specific implementation in SR3 all that much).

- Not enough print space to really get across the feel of hermetics vs. shamans (but SR3 was no different).

- The loss of Light/Moderate/Serious/Deadly damage rules that made one-shot takedowns a regular occurence - which I believe is a *necessity* in a stealth-oriented game.

- The idea that wireless networking is suitable as a replacement for *all* of a wired network, including all the bulk and/or long-range data transfer, instead of just as a really good interface to mobile/isolated devices/users. Easily fixed by a setting "houserule" that doesn't affect the gameplay in any way whatsoever.

- Where has the Ford-Canada Bison and/or RR Prairie Cat gone in the vehicle list? And the GMC MPUV? Those were the standard "runner trucks" in every SR3 game I ever played in.

- In SR3, no runner could have an full-scale aircraft because of Availability restrictions. Now, no runner can have an full-scale aircraft because of the high/realistic price - even the cheapest workhorse utility chopper costs 225,000¥. I don't think a civilian light aircraft or helicopter is out of genre for Shadowrun (where there are ostensibly people who use military vehicles worth multiple millions of nuyen for smuggling), and I'd like to have it as a legal option for PCs.

- Hard capping traits. Fine for a game like Exalted, or Mage:The Awakening, where there's an arbitrarily large set of supernatural powers to explore and Attributes/Skills are only the beginning. Not so hot for SR where many characters can be left with nowhere to go but backfilling their secondary skillsets. On the other hand, in my long but sparse SR experience, I always spent the bulk of my Karma improving secondary abilities anyway because the return on investment is so much better!

- Magic users and Technomancers get the only soft-capped Attributes. Not truly fair, but on the other hand, unlikely to be an issue in realistic time frames for games and character advancement.


Loathes: None significant. Wait till I play it, maybe I'll find some.

As you can see, I have some significant loves for the new system and only relatively minor quibbles. Several of *those* are things that SR3 was just as bad, if not worse, at.

Overall? SR4++

about the complaints on foci changes and similar changes not coverd in the back story. fasa pulled a similar one going from SR2 to SR3, suddenly grounding was totaly gone and you could pass thru living beings. no backstory for the change, nada.

and having all elemental effect spell be combat spells makes more sense then having them all be elemental manipulations. the design rules in MITS didnt cover the diff between elemental manipulations and other manipulations and therefor you could in theory use said rules to design sustained damage spells but then it may well be that we do not get design rules this time round...

info@shadowrunrpg.com would be the place for that.

Pistons is quite clearly talking about my not-prolific sister.

Adam, you *definitely* have to send them your sister's profile. If you don't have the time, I'm sure that many here will volunteer to write it.

For the record, for those unaware, that was not originally my typo. It is how it appears in the book.

That said, unless you would like "Ada" to remain for humor value, it will be corrected soon. I'm a bit embarrassed that I missed it when I was doing the data entry...

I just really, really want the book

FanPro is this big: *puts one hand on one side of Rob, puts the other hand on the other side of Rob, holds the hands up for a visual*

~J

FanPro LLC and FanPro GmbH are two distinct companies.

Isn't it technically Fantasy Productions GmbH, while FanPro LLC is formally FanPro?

~J