GamerPay Skins School Lesson 1: Basics of CSGO/CS2 Skins & Items

GamerPay Skins School 1: The basics

Together with our Professor Asger Yde, we aim to teach you CSGO!
So get ready for our Skins School, we will cover everything you need to know about skins broadly and in-depth. After you graduate from our school you will be knowledgeable about floats, the CSGO market and even pricing your skins.
If you prefer watching over reading, check out our GamerPay Youtube channel, where you can find all the videos from our beloved Professor Asger.

Click the picture to be redirected to our YouTube!

We would like to start out by separating CSGO skins and CSGO items as there are a few major differences between them.
Skins are purely cosmetic designs that change the design and thus look of your weapon.

CSGO skins

Each skin (excluding Vanilla knives) is unique and has a different float and different pattern which is what determines how the skin looks. Not every skin is pattern-based, just the same way that Vanilla Knives are not float-based (you can still get “low” or “high” float ones, but that only tracks with databases. You can’t differentiate from a high float to a low float vanilla knife in the game).

CSGO items

In comparison to skins, items themselves cannot be used in-game directly. They also do not have any floats or patterns, and therefore all items are the same. You can open cases or apply stickers to guns, but this is a topic for another time.

But what those two classes do have in common is, that they both share a monetary value and can be traded to other players. This has created one of the biggest virtual markets in the whole gaming industry.

Where do Skins come from?

Skins derive from drops, unboxing cases or souvenir packages. All of which you can open if you spend money in-game or on the community market. But if you are looking at getting skins, the cheapest way is to outright buy them. They exist for Agents, Pistols, Rifles, Sniper Rifles, SMGs, Heavys, Knives and Gloves.

What is StatTrak?

Only skins can appear in what is called StatTrak, which is a kill counter on your weapon and rarer to unbox. Collection items from Operations or Souvenir/Map collections do not come in StatTrak. Only skins unboxed from cases!
So every time you get a kill with your StatTrak skin equipped, the number on it increases by one, however, StatTrak does not appear on any other item in CSGO except Music Kits.

Floats

There are 5 different float categories in CSGO and CS2. These range from good-looking and clean, to beat-up and destroyed.

These floats are:

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Factory New (FN)	Minimal Wear (MW)	Field Tested (FT)	Well Worn (WW)	Battle Scarred (BS)
Which has a float from 0 - 0.07	Which has a float from 0.07 - 0.15	Which has a float from 0.15 - 0.38	Which has a float from 0.38 - 0.45	Which has a float from 0.45 - 1
The "cleanest" one, desired	Second best float value	Often most easy to sell/ more budget	Often harder to sell	Often destroyed skins, sometimes just darker

In a majority of the cases the closer it is to 0 the better, cleaner and newer it looks, while closer to 1 makes them look worn, and torn but this is not the case for all of the skins. As stated some just get darker, for instance, the AWP | Medusa does not look more worn but just becomes darker in colour.

The Medusa in FN and BS. The only difference is that the higher float, in contrast to the lower float, looks darker.
This has gained the Battle-Scarred AWP | Medusa the nickname of “Green Witch”.

Patterns

All skins are going to have a pattern ranging from 1-1000. Just like the floats a pattern is a number that is randomly generated. Some skins look the exact same despite having different patterns,
Take the AK-47 | Asiimov for example!
There is no difference in how it looks because the skin is “non-pattern based”
Here are patterns 670 and 21 (the only thing slightly different from them is the scratch pattern, and this is quite minute.)

Pattern 670

Pattern 21

Pattern for unboxed skins go from 0 to 999, if you do trade-ups you can reach pattern 1000. No covert item will ever exist with pattern ID 1000.

However, on some skins like the Case Hardened, the pattern can mix up the look of the skin dramatically!
For Pattern-based skins, the number of the pattern defines what part of the image will be used on the skin.

As you can see here with the M9, the weapon is put on an image, and the placement of the weapon on the image is decided by the pattern number, creating different-looking skins.

This also can create the highly sought-after and rare “Blue gem knives”, which have a lot of this blue pattern on them.

If you want more info on how patterns work, be sure to check out the episode on our YouTube!

Rarity

Skins are also separated into 8 types of rarities:

Consumer grade (only in collections)

Industrial Grade (only in collections)

Mil-Spec (in cases and Collections)

Restricted (in Cases and Collections)

Classified (in Cases and Collections)

Covert (in Cases and Collections)

Rare Special Item (only in Cases)

and Contraband! (Only the M4A4 | Howl due to copyright issues)

Picture taken from CSGOstash

If you unbox a “Rare Special item”, a “Gold” from a Case is shown as Covert once it has been unboxed, and a “Rare Special Item” can be either a Knife or Gloves. That always depends on what case you open. Each Case has only one type of “Rare Special Item”, so either Knife or Gloves, not both.

In CSGO skin Cases you are only able to get Mil-spec or above.
Consumer Grade, as well as Industrial Grade items, can only be obtained through drops or souvenir packages. 
These are the aforementioned “Collections”.

The only skin that is Contraband is the infamous Howl, which can nowadays only be obtained by buying it from other players or on market sites such as GamerPay, as it does not exist in its Case of origin anymore.

What are the odds of CSGO cases?

When unboxing cases you have a 79,92% chance of getting a Mil-spec, 15,98% chance of getting a Restricted, 3,19% chance of getting a Classified, 0,63% chance of getting Covert, 0,25% of getting a Rare Special Item. 

Those percentages drop by 90% for getting the StatTrak version or go down to 1/10th the chance of getting a non-stattrak skin. 

Souvenir packages do not have a Rare Special Item, but their Covert skin has the same chances as a StatTrak Knife, of only around 0,0255%!

Visualisation of the odds, credit to HeyZeus via Twitter

Conclusion

“This wraps up the first lesson of GamerPay Skins School.
We’ll catch you in the next one!” - Professor Asger Yde

Thank you for reading our Skins School article!
There are quite a few more episodes of it, make sure to check out our YouTube to see them all.

We hope that this series can bring you CSGO, soon-to-be CS2, skins, items and trading a lot closer!
If you are here to be educated, you will know your way around skins after graduating from our GamerPay Skin School!