I'm less worried about how it balances out for Karl 'The Kaster' Drago looking at the rules saying I'll break you, and how it balances out for an solid-but-not-min/maxed runner. No matter how well you try to make the rules Karl will find the loop-holes that let him break the game. More so then other archetypes awakened need to have a good player/GM confab to make sure everyone is on the same page with what is and isn't the level of campaign you're building. If the player insists on constantly OPing your game with their mage just remember the ol' adage, "Anything you can do the Corps can do better. They can do everything better then you." Magic users are supposed to be fairly rare in world, but you can bet if Karl is going around being a magical mass murderer and terrorist, a High Threat Response Team with a bunch of mages and adepts with spirit backup will come to remove him from existence.
Also something that I haven't seen mentioned for spirits. All the talk so far seems to treat them like disposable drones, which just strikes me as wrong. Spirits are living, reasoning beings, and aren't just going to blindly follow the full intent of commands. They can (and probably will if the mage has a bad rap in the spirit world) twist the orders they're given to something the mage never intended, wasting favors and shortening their service.
Typical example of trying to fix bad rule design by arbitrary ingame bullying.
The main problem of OP mages is not that they kill people (maybe even more than other runners, because they are more effective) but that they are taking away the fun from the other players. Same goes for too powerful spirits.
The logic to let the game world retaliate because a player used totally viable game mechanics (what is rule abuse anyway? either something is allowed or not. At what point should I feel guilty?) is just bad GMing.
If players want equally powerful characters (which might not even be the case) and the rule set does not deliver that, the only thing that helps is house rules (and a good discussion about the problem, which might result in more house rules). NOT "The Game World strikes back!".
I'm sorry, I thought we were playing a game where characters often operate under the tagline "I kill people. For money."
"The Game World strikes back!" is what happens in literally every game ever made. You're not the only people moving in a world in stasis. If you go lobbing acid bombs into a cubical farm full of wage slaves, guards will come to arrest or put you down. Get in a bar fight with the Halloweeners cause your buddy Lucky Eyes wanted to talk smack, his buddies may come find you and practice the Art of Beating on your bones (then you go punch Lucky Eyes in that secondhand eye-ware he calls cyber). In game bullying would be sending the Red Samurai after you for painting 'Renraku Sucks!' on the side of their building. Sending them when you blow up a floor of the tower with a few pounds of C4 is a proper response.
There are rules and guild lines for security responses in the books, just as there is a rule (called Spirit Index) for how much of a fragger the local spirit world thinks you are. Not to mention every piece of Shadowrun fluff all the way back to the very first novel that has had spirits in it has shown them to be complex beings with thoughts and feelings and emotions alien to but on par with the meatsacs who summon them. Why would they react differently then any other NPC just because of a compulsion.
BTW: There is such thing as rules with no loopholes. Thats what a balanced rulesystem provides. Of course you can never get that with linear rule systems (without limits). You need power laws or exponential curves in it AKA "diminishing returns".
Even with 'exponential curve' rules, there's still ways to break them. Every rule can be broken, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of how. If you've never ran into this then Congrats! Seriously, it means neither you nor your group is a min/maxing munchkin and that is a reason to celebrate. If Karl Kaster is acting out badly, talk to them first as they may not realize what they're doing (or just got carried away) and have them tone it back a bit. If they pull a "well it says in the rules that I can so *pssst*" then you bring in a precision response and re-evaluate if Karl Kaster has a place at your table.
just bad GMing.
Going 'you got 2 dice too many so let me increase the competition' is a problem. 'You're throwing around so many high-Force Spirits that the government has taken an interest' is not.
Even the first part is sort of a last resort imo unless the team on the whole is doing it. If it’s just the mage with stupid force fireballs or the street sam with a bag of grenades talk to the player first. I prefer not to TPK over one player.
I'll admit, I didn't think that needed to be said as it should be a given. Players sometimes don't realize what their doing or just plain get carried away. It happens. And other players shouldn't be punished for one persons bad table manners.
Though for focus abuse again I preferred early editions and they had a built in setting fix. Go ahead build your focus drop karma and money and the first astral security mage who spots you on a run destroys them all and you wasted piles of karma and money. They have got harder and harder to destroy over the editions. It used to be in my games no one took a focus until they could mask it as the setting risk was too high. Now it seems people start with multiples of them in various builds I see on this forum.
That’s my hope for this edition. Make focuses easy to permanently destroy again. Make active focuses the turning on your wireless with a crap comlink for defense for mages instead of turning on your wireless but with firewall 20.
Ghost yes! I'm glad the old 'ground a fireball through the focus' is gone, but if I can unravel a spell or spirit from a ways off, I should be able to unravel the magic in a focus, temporarily or permanently.