Forum:Treatment of attachments pre-BF3

So what I've been noticing, going through a lot of pre-BF3 articles, is that optics, suppressors, and attachments which are nothing more than static parts of a weapon's model are being categorized and mentioned as being "attachments", "gadgets", and "weapons" of their respective games.

In some cases -- such as with the underslung weaponry of BF2, BF2142, etc -- this is acceptable. In fact, the Assault's gadget pre-BF3 was actually the underslung GL. But with others -- most notably the optics and suppressors -- what we're dealing with is scarcely more than a part of the weapon's model. Take for instance F2000 (1.6x). Even though it had an optic in BF2 (as per layman's terms), in actuality all that "optic" is, really, is a mesh. It's part of the weapon itself. The F2000 has no special mechanics or anything.

Similarly, the suppressed handguns in BF2, the suppressed sten gun in BF1942. This is nothing more than cosmetic changes. It doesn't have an actual effect on gameplay. It's just part of the mesh, with a special soundfile to go with it.

My question to the other admins is this: how are we going to treat "attachments" in the games before attachments were actually attachments? Юра  03:33, March 24, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion
To start off, I'd like to say that a similar question actually came up years ago regarding the optics of BFBC2. The question back then was whether or not the optics were an attachment, or a specialization. In the end, we decided that the RDS and 4x Scope were specializations alone, and not attachments.

My position, following that line of thinking, is that we shouldn't have dedicated articles on these pseudo attachments if they aren't verifiably different from their standard counterpart (assuming they even have one) or the weapon they're attached to as a whole. We should mention, for instance, that the handguns in BF2 have a special variant with cosmetic changes, but I don't think that warrants the addition of a whole section for BF2 on the suppressor page.

On the other hand, gadgets that are actually separate things (for instance the underslung GLs, or the bayonet from RtR) should have their own article/section dedicated to them -- but they should be called gadgets, not called attachments. Юра  03:33, March 24, 2014 (UTC)