CS2 Skin Quality Guide – All You Need To Know

Many players are surprised by the skin pricing system in CS2. Some seemingly beautiful and flashy items, which can even be found in the inventory of popular esports players, are not expensive at all. Meanwhile, a simple and not stylish skin can be damn valuable and be worth tens or hundreds of dollars.

There is nothing strange about this. The point is that not only the visual component matters, but also the CS2 skin quality. We refer to the technical parameters of the item, as well as its classification within a specific collection and category.

Now, the Bloodycase.com team will help you understand this issue. We will explain how exactly each item in the game is evaluated, talk about skin quality in CS2, wear levels, the impact of stickers on the price, and much more.

What Determines the Quality of CS2 Skins?

Below, we list the factors that affect CS2 weapon quality and, accordingly, the cost of a particular item. We will not separately mention the design. Just know that this factor still influences the price in CS2.

• Quality category. Each group of items has its color, indicating the likelihood of receiving it. There are such skins options: purple, yellow, orange, dark green, light green. Some of these things cannot be received from cases. We will discuss this classification further below.
• Rarity. The more often skins appear on the market and in cases, the lower their cost. The lowest CS2 item quality is associated with Consumer Grade items. These are the most common skins, which you can even get for free – after finishing a match in the game. The rarest class is Contraband. These are unique items that can no longer be obtained from cases, as they have been discontinued. They can only be bought on third-party platforms. So far, there is only one skin in this category – M4A4 Howl.
• Stickers. Each sticker has its price. Accordingly, if you add it to a specific weapon, you increase the item’s value.
• StatTrak. This feature greatly influences the CS2 skin quality ranking. We mean weapons that have a kill counter. It never resets. The gun “remembers” every kill in the game forever.
• Souvenir. This list includes skins that can be received during Majors. They contain team logos and the tournament’s logo.

The most desired skin with the highest rank can be considered Contraband. The impossibility of obtaining this item from cases and exclusivity creates a genuine hype around items of this type.

CS2 Skins Quality Chart

Let’s look at how CS2 gun skin quality depends on the color of the item, that is, the category it belongs to.

• Light Green/Dark Green. This is an unofficial description used by players. The category includes the most common and frequently found items in the gaming community. Light Green are items with the lowest value, Dark Green are worth a little more.
• Purple. In this chart, these in-game items have an average position. They appear much more often than the things mentioned earlier, but are still not considered something exclusive.
• Yellow. One of the most desired colors in our CS2 skin quality chart. This category includes knives and gloves. Players sometimes refer to items from this group as Gold.
• Orange. These are skins of increased rarity, also called Classified.

Important point! Due to its characteristic color, some players may refer to the above-mentioned M4A4 Howl when saying “Orange”. It is the only skin in the Contraband category. It has an interesting story: the skin was added to the game, but it was later discovered that its design had been stolen from a private designer, so the item had to be removed from the in-game store. But in CS2, the skin remained. It is considered the most legendary.

CS2 Skins Rarity

Some skins can be found in every second player’s inventory in CS2, while seeing some others on a teammate or opponent makes gamers excited. All because of the rarity of a particular item. Of course, in the second case, shooter fans value the skins significantly higher.

Let’s look at the classification of things depending on this parameter. We will start with the most common and less valuable and finish with the most expensive things.

• Consumer Grade.
• Industrial Grade.
• Mil-Spec.
• Restricted.
• Classified.
• Covert.
• Contraband.
• Exceedingly Rare.

Only knives and gloves fall into the Exceedingly Rare category. The chance to get such an item from a case is significantly less than one percent.

Wear Levels

CS2 skins quality largely depends on how worn a particular item is. An important point: the degree of wear is a fixed parameter. This means that the situation where you get a new thing from a case, but it wears out after 100 matches, is impossible. The degree of wear is measured on a scale from 0 to 1.

Let’s look at the list of levels in descending order of quality.

• Factory New (FN) – from 0.00 to 0.07. The item looks new.
• Minimal Wear (MW) – from 0.07 to 0.15. There are minor scratches on the skin that do not strongly affect its appearance.
• Field-Tested (FT) – from 0.15 to 0.38. Scratches, chips, and abrasions become more visible.
• Well-Worn (WW) – from 0.38 to 0.45. The weapon has noticeable damage that significantly affects the visual component.
• Battle-Scarred (BS) – from 0.45 to 1.00. The skin has serious damage, which justifies the category’s name. According to the developers’ idea, this is a weapon that has been used in more than a hundred battles.

The guide here, it seems, should be as logical as possible: the newer the item, the more expensive it is. In the vast majority of cases, this is indeed true, but there are exceptions. The point is that some skins receive damage that even looks like beautiful design elements.

A good example is the AK-47 Case Hardened. In a Factory New condition, it can be bought even for $50. But the Battle-Scarred skin is infrequent and expensive. When putting an item up for sale, owners often set the price above $100,000. And this is far from the only skin that is worth more with damage than new.

Presence of Stickers on Weapons

Stickers allow players to be designers of in-game things themselves. Weapons can be decorated with such small elements, which can significantly affect their value.

The point is that stickers also have their value. The highest prices are typically associated with items tied to specific tournaments. Practice shows that the older the sticker, the more expensive it is.

For example, here is a sticker of the team Natus Vincere from the Katowice 2014 tournament. The price is approximately $11,000.

 

Here is a sticker with the autograph of s1mple from Krakow (2017). Such a sticker increases the skin’s price by approximately $5,000.

A special place in the hearts of CS fans is occupied by stickers with logos of teams that no longer exist. The leader among them is Titan (Katowice, 2014). The price is $75 thousand.

As we can see, a sticker can not only add to the value of a skin on a specific weapon but also exceed the price of the original item by tens of times.

StatTrak™ Weapons

Reminder: StatTrak is a skin on weapons that includes a kill counter. The count of kills is not for a specific player, but for one particular skin. If you buy a StatTrak AK-47 with 500 kills on the counter, after your first kill with the new gun, you will see not 1, but 501.

StatTrak looks on the weapon as follows (the number of kills is circled).

StatTrak has a significant impact on the CS2 skin quality rank. Often, this feature increases the price by 100% or even more.

Souvenir Skins

Souvenir Skins are not just decorations and an addition to the inventory, but collectible things with a history connected to specific game events. We are talking about Major-level tournaments. You can get the item from special cases – Souvenir Packages. As soon as the event ends, these cases disappear from sale.

Such skins may have stickers with the tournament logo, date, and map on which a particular match was played, autographs of professional players, and the competition logo. In short, this is a complex item that is evaluated accordingly. Such skins are often valued at $5000 and higher.

Here is an example of such an item: AK-47 Gold Arabesque.

You must agree, it looks significantly more original and epic than the classic skins that can be received via regular cases.

How Does the Exterior Quality of Skin Affect Its Value?

Of course, such a subjective factor as appearance also affects the item’s value. Here is an example of a skin that is simple from a visual point of view on the Deagle, one of the most popular pistols in the game.

It looks quite corny, doesn’t it? And how about this option?

 

By the way, it was seriously hyped by s1mple at one point, which also influenced its popularity and price. Oh yes, it is called Printstream.

Speaking about appearance, we should again mention a wear level. In most cases, the more worn an item is, the cheaper it is, because the original designer’s idea is “masked” by scratches and chips.

Originality of appearance does not always convert into a high price. For example, a USP-S Torque, which was once popular among professional players, costs very little. It can be bought for $1-3.

 

Conclusion

Skins in CS have long ceased to be just decoration. As soon as a whole trading industry developed around these items, players’ approach to buying and selling changed significantly. Today, it’s not just about getting pixels in a computer game, but a full-fledged investment.

Therefore, the price is determined scrupulously by each participant and the market as a whole. To avoid overpaying for a skin or underselling your item, consider the factors listed in this article.