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An article that focuses on skins in a game called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Made for new players by an experienced player.
An article that focuses on skins in a game called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Made for new players by an experienced player.
What are skins?
Skins are visual/aesthetic looks for different weapons in CS:GO. They DO NOT bring any advantage in game other than better visual experience. Obviously, different people have different tastes and therefore no everyone will like the same skin, however I'll try to explain the history, market value, pros and cons and other aspects of skins in this article. Besides skins, there are keys, graffiti, stickers, music kits and other items that don't have a much of a meaning or aren't popular. There are also StatTrak skins which count your kills with that particular skin (they are rarer and cost more).
The skins were first introduced in a 2013 update and from then they played a great role in the gameplay and development of the gameitself.
Different tiers of skins:
Tier of skin basically tells how valuable the skin is (how high is the skin's quality or how rare is it) and that should should reflect in the skin's price (the higher the tier is the more expensive the skin is). I should warn you that the skin's quality doesn't always reflect it's aesthetic looks as there are very cheap skins for cents and vice versa, there are ugly skins that cost fortune, but again, it's all personal :)
There are 7 tiers (from most common to the rarest ones): Consumer Grade, Industrial Grade, Mil Spec, Restricted, Classified, Covert and Contraband. You may read more about these here: http://counterstrike.wikia.com/wiki/Skins
How to get skins:
There are 5 ways of getting skins: Getting a drop in a server, Opening crates with keys, Trading for them, Buying them on third-party sites and Buying them on Steam Community Market. Recently Valve added a 7 day trade hold for any CS.GO item meaning that when ever you get a skin by any of these 5 methods, you'll have to wait 7 days before you trade/sell them.
Also, be careful when buying skins as there are many scammers looking to steal people's skins. I recommend buying skins from Bitskins, as it's the most popular skin market on the Internet and the prices are way lower than on Steam Community Market.
Skin economy:
It might come to your surprise that many people earn their paycheck trough CS:GO skins but that is true. What most of these people do is fairly simple: They buy low and sell high. It sounds simple but it isn't. The skin market is huge and there are special rare skins with different patterns and colour schemes which drastically increase their price. The basic rule of the skin market is supply-demand: the higher the quantity the lower the price and vice versa. Due to the recent 7-day trade hold which I talked about, many skins have dropped in price and most of the people stopped trading/reselling skins for living. There was a gambling scandal with skins causing many gambling sites to close. Also, the biggest market place OpSkins recently closed which drastically lowered the price for many skins.
Closing notes:
As you could have read in my article there are many pros and cons of skins. They bring the aesthetics up and personalize your game more. However, they are expensive, complicated and most importantly they don't bring you any advantage in game (which is good) other than the aesthetic appeal. If you wish to buy skins, I suggest you do it on your budget. Don't spend too much and you'll be good. Thanks for reading and check out my other articles :)