Okay so this has been bothering me the first time we played at the gamestore we were using this weird rule that i cant seem to find regarding weapon ranges and now im wondering if it was a houserule or if there was some truth to it. Weapons firing closer than their effective range gain a difficulty die per range band they are out of their optimal range they gain the difficulty in all that. And same upwards or was this just some weird houserule they came up with on the fly because they probably forgot

Weird house rule. The base difficulty for ranges are fixed, the closer you are the easier it gets ( until you start using ranged weapons in melee range)

The range listed for weapons is just the max range without talents or other special modifiers.

House rule. I withhold judgement on relative weirdness or not............

Okay so this has been bothering me the first time we played at the gamestore we were using this weird rule that i cant seem to find regarding weapon ranges and now im wondering if it was a houserule or if there was some truth to it. Weapons firing closer than their effective range gain a difficulty die per range band they are out of their optimal range they gain the difficulty in all that. And same upwards or was this just some weird houserule they came up with on the fly because they probably forgot

Sounds like the GM just wasn't all that familiar with the rules, and made an ad hoc ruling. A pretty crappy one too, since it'd make weapons like the blaster rifle much less effective at Short Range and nearly useless at Engaged.