Sidegrade sacrifices

[Cuross]

So, I've been reading up a lot on this sidegrade thing, and while I love the idea of sidegrading instead of upgrading for the sake of balance, it leaves me a bit confused on the actual customization of the equipment.

Here's what I'm thinking. Say you're a light assault and you want to sidegrade a battle rifle to deal heavy damage with great accuracy, typically creating a marksman rifle, about halfway between assault and sniper. From what people are saying, though, it seems that weapon sidegrades are speculated to sacrifice accuracy for damage, clip size for reload speed, etc.

Why I'm interested in learning more about this, and maybe this will be left undisclosed to the public until Beta, but I'd like to know if we can pick and choose what sacrifices we must make for the sidegrade. Like I want damage but I choose to sacrifice something else instead of accuracy like reload speed, recoil, or even clip size. And expanding on this maybe even choose just one sacrifice to make over all sidegrades, like sacrificing rate of fire over both accuracy and damage.

This is starting to sound more like a new idea, but really this is just me guessing and looking for clarification haha. Anyone else have any thoughts on how it works?

[TheRagingGerbil]

Well that is how it will work. Your side grades will cause a loss in stats in other areas.

So you will trade accuracy for rate of fire.

Or you fill trade a heavy round for reload speed.

[Fafnir]

Specialized things like marksman rifle will most likely be covered by buying a new weapon, not by sidegrading i.e. your sniper rifle. You will then be able to add mods, which aren't that significiant as swapping a weapon.

As far as I know mods add only positive values, but you have to chose one of them for each slot.
So tradeoffs aren't there, because you chose a mod with + rate of fire and - accuracy, but because you chose a mod with + rate of fire instead of a mod with + accuracy for specific slot.