Originally posted by karajorma
Now every mission designer has to test the difficult of the mission under both conditions adding to the amount of work that has to be done when it comes to play-balancing.

No they don't. Mission designers generally don't test their work on all five levels of difficulty, do they?
Secondly even if you make it a player option the first thing any mission designer who cares about this will do is edit the weapons table so that all beams have the Pierce flag on them thereby negating the players choice.
More than likely they won't bother. And anyway the source can be designed to prevent this.
Originally posted by venom2506
what? of course not! otherwise it's up to the pilot to choose the range of the maxim and the strengh of the prometheus?
No, the purpose of this is to correct a bug in the original, but leave people the option to circumvent it if they choose (or vice versa; see below).
I think this should be a general SCP rule:
ALL MODIFICATION THAT WOULD CHANGE THE GAMEPLAY BALANCE IN ANY WAY MUST BE DISABLED BY DEFAULT.
But this is a valid point.
Howabout this. Put the beams back to shield-piercing by default, but make a command-line flag that will cause the beams not to pierce shields.
This is as convoluted an example of "it's not a bug, it's a feature" I've ever seen. 