For every example of an abusive player consciously breaking the Edge system, there's another hundred where some player will do something in the grey area, not out of malice, but out of cleverness and a desire to demonstrate systems mastery. The game explicitly sets Edge up as a big fat glowing target. Of course players are going to optimise for it; they'd be fools not to. And some of them are going to push the envelope in pursuit of that, and as Lormyr succinctly put it above, they don't think they're cheating; they think they're playing the rules-as-written and doing a good job of it. Which they are, from one perspective. So as a GM you're set up to have an endless cycle of awkward decisions and awkward conversations about it. Which doesn't sound fun, to me.
Penllawen, first, I had forgotten about the "Edge Abuse" section in the 6E rules. My reply to that is I really don't think that section was or should be necessary. But my other reply is that obviously the designers recognize that the attitude you and others point to is a real thing among Shadowrun players and feel they have to manage it. Which...fair enough? It still boggles my mind that it is such a big issue, but I'll accept its a real one.
I have two thoughts on the quoted passage above...
* Insofar as a player is engaging with the ongoing story of the game in interesting and fun ways, how does them "optimising" something in the game become a problem? Like, I make some choices for my character to make my character super-cool, and then I play my character in ways that all the other folks at the table are enjoying, but I happen to be using Edge super-efficiently. I'm not seeing any problem there. Up to a point, which leads me to...
* Insofar as a player is inadvertently "optimising" their character or their play in ways that are actively unfun for others, why does that conversation have to be awkward? Its just a conversation between well-meaning people.
Maybe I'm not seeing the problem here. I'll tie this back to Ghost Rigger's earlier post...
Maybe. Or maybe they'll get so good at coming up with excuses for their blatant edge abuse that you can no longer distinguish it from a player thinking outside the box.
"I shoot the random bystander so that they don't call the cops."
"I shoot the scientists first, because they will run away while the guards stay put and we were ordered to leave no witnesses."
"I dataspike the coffee machine in the middle of combat so that the goons are distracted by the smoke and sparks."
I'm honestly not seeing the problem with any of those, here is why. Either...
* the player is just playing to the scene and the situation, doing cool stuff that all of us think is fun, in which case, enjoy the Edge, player! or
* the player is being a jerk, in which case I throw popcorn at them and say "ugh..boo"
I don't see that as very difficult to handle or discriminate between. And more importantly, I don't see the fact that its possible to do what Ghost Rigger describes as necessarily a problem with the rules.
I think there are problems with the Edge rules, don't get me wrong. But my problems have to do with their clunky construction, the fact that they don't seem to actually streamline much of anything, the fact that who can earn Edge and who can't and in what circumstances doesn't seem to have a whole lot of logic behind it in every case, etc. The kind of worry Ghost Rigger is expressing above is just not on my radar.
I feel like I have dragged this thread a long way off the original topic, which was specifically about armor and defense ratings. So I"m going to leave it here and give others the last word if they want to have it on the issue I have raised.