This is stuff that I've encountered, too. I have no idea why a person would choose to wear heavy armor. For 2,000 credits, you can get 8 soak at the cost of 4 defense in a suit that has a vulnerability to Electric damage. Which means a couple of things.
1. With a 48 credit electro-pistol, I can ignore your 2,000 credit purchase. But that pistol is weak compared to standard pistols, so fair enough. But that still means...
2. For half a credit per bullet, I can use AP rounds that ignore 60% of that 2,000 credit purchase at zero penalty. There's no trade-off for AP rounds, and at 10 credits for 20, there's no reason not to use them. Not to mention the defense penalty of heavy armor means it's easier to hurt them than it would be to hurt someone in lighter armor.
3. The biggest issue in my eyes, for RP if not for balance, is HP rounds. Bullets that are meant to shatter more easily so they do more damage against soft targets but do little against armor. But they do +1d6 damage at a cost of -1d6 to hit. That means that, the heavier the target's armor, the more effective hollowpoint rounds become, because that penalty to hit is mitigated by their own defense penalty.
4. And then there's Weak Point. A one grade dip in a career that's pretty easy to get into gives you an exploit that lets you totally ignore soak once per target. Now the tradeoff, at least in how I read it, is that if you miss that Weak Point shot, you can't try it again - you've used that exploit against that target. But the heavier the armor they're wearing, the easier they are to hit, making it easier to ignore their soak entirely.
So with those issues comes the question that I still haven't figured out the answer to. Kind of a multi-parter, I guess. If quality is available, even capped at exceptional, there becomes no reason to wear heavy armor, because you can get better light armor for less money using quality. If rarity is to be more strictly enforced on quality, how do we enforce it? What's the metric there? What do "uncommon" and "rare" mean? How do they factor into loot or purchases or what-have-you? And if players should not be able to purchase any item of quality (which seems silly to me, since a market, especially a futuristic one, is going to have higher quality options readily available for a higher price), then what do they do with their money? Vehicles are ungodly expensive, as are cybernetics, to the point where it makes me question when a player, by the standard loot rules, could ever make enough money to afford them. And there seems to be nothing to purchase between the "couple thousand" and "couple tens of thousands" price ranges.
And then there's the issue of dangling quality in front of a player. There's little more frustrating to a player, at least for me, as an arbitrary ruling, and saying "You have a space ship and a galactic market, but you can't find an uncommon item despite having the money to pay for it," seems pretty arbitrary - at least without some sort of metric or roll or something to determine what those rarity terms actually mean.
1. With a 48 credit electro-pistol, I can ignore your 2,000 credit purchase. But that pistol is weak compared to standard pistols, so fair enough. But that still means...
2. For half a credit per bullet, I can use AP rounds that ignore 60% of that 2,000 credit purchase at zero penalty. There's no trade-off for AP rounds, and at 10 credits for 20, there's no reason not to use them. Not to mention the defense penalty of heavy armor means it's easier to hurt them than it would be to hurt someone in lighter armor.
3. The biggest issue in my eyes, for RP if not for balance, is HP rounds. Bullets that are meant to shatter more easily so they do more damage against soft targets but do little against armor. But they do +1d6 damage at a cost of -1d6 to hit. That means that, the heavier the target's armor, the more effective hollowpoint rounds become, because that penalty to hit is mitigated by their own defense penalty.
4. And then there's Weak Point. A one grade dip in a career that's pretty easy to get into gives you an exploit that lets you totally ignore soak once per target. Now the tradeoff, at least in how I read it, is that if you miss that Weak Point shot, you can't try it again - you've used that exploit against that target. But the heavier the armor they're wearing, the easier they are to hit, making it easier to ignore their soak entirely.
So with those issues comes the question that I still haven't figured out the answer to. Kind of a multi-parter, I guess. If quality is available, even capped at exceptional, there becomes no reason to wear heavy armor, because you can get better light armor for less money using quality. If rarity is to be more strictly enforced on quality, how do we enforce it? What's the metric there? What do "uncommon" and "rare" mean? How do they factor into loot or purchases or what-have-you? And if players should not be able to purchase any item of quality (which seems silly to me, since a market, especially a futuristic one, is going to have higher quality options readily available for a higher price), then what do they do with their money? Vehicles are ungodly expensive, as are cybernetics, to the point where it makes me question when a player, by the standard loot rules, could ever make enough money to afford them. And there seems to be nothing to purchase between the "couple thousand" and "couple tens of thousands" price ranges.
And then there's the issue of dangling quality in front of a player. There's little more frustrating to a player, at least for me, as an arbitrary ruling, and saying "You have a space ship and a galactic market, but you can't find an uncommon item despite having the money to pay for it," seems pretty arbitrary - at least without some sort of metric or roll or something to determine what those rarity terms actually mean.