One of the most insane skin website viewers I’ve ever seen.
You can see everything almost like you’re inside an inspect server. The amount of work behind this is crazy.
Honestly, I was blown away.
Don’t forget to follow. @SkinCraftGG
(not sponsored)
Find the perfect knife glove combo using the First Person Viewer on https://t.co/GtyDotED3o! Explore combos using all CS2 Knives and Gloves with all 1,000 patterns and possible wear values, visible on all CS2 backgrounds in one-to-one lighting. Identical to in-game!
@g0dspeedx @ThourCS2 Having gone back and played it again (both with bots and on community servers) I still think GO is more responsive in many aspects, but CS2 definitely did improve on a number of things
HELP! MY ACCOUNT GOT HACKED AND I AM NOW BEING BLACKMAILED
PLEASE X PEOPLE, TAG ANYONE YOU MAY KNOW IN STEAM SUPPORT TO RESPOND TO MY TICKET (HT-7HXJ-VP85-9HXQ) ASAP @Steam@CounterStrike@valvesoftware
@Ozzny_CS2 Short term this update is going to be painful for many, but the market has needed a correction like this for a while. As you mentioned, even some of the low tier stuff was starting to get to ridiculous prices. It'll certainly be interesting to see where the market goes from here.
Small CS Skins / new Trade-Up Update rant ‼️
As someone who makes CS skins content on YouTube, I have to admit it was getting to a ridiculous point. It came to the point where a $500 budget would be considered CHEAP for a Knife + Glove combo and with that $500 you couldn't even get something anywhere near "nice"
In recent months, it only got worse, gloves considered "ugly" were going up in price 2,3,4x out of nowhere. The hand wraps spruce ddpat went from 100ish$ to 650$ in FIELD TESTED (!!) from one week to another, this was happening with different gloves every week. Don't get me wrong, I don't think every player should be able to afford an M9 Doppler Phase 2, if you can't afford the highest of the highest in a free market where people set the price, THAT'S FINE. You're not entitled to it, just buy something cheaper. The problem is, it wasn't about players being priced out of high tier skins, average CS players were getting priced out on EVERYTHING in the "gold items market", and if it continued the way it was going, it was only going to get worse (thank China for that)
My DMs and YT comments in the last few months have been full of crypto people just wanting to buy Knives and Gloves to sit on them because it was the cool and popular thing going up in price, they were not going to play with them.
This isn't going to "wipe the market" as many claim, the long term result here imo will be: Knives and Gloves will be much cheaper, this is guaranteed, a lot more people will be able to afford nicer stuff. Coverts and Pinks (with good float specially) will be much more expensive than they were. What this will do is kind of re-balance the market, take money out of gold items and put SOME of it into coverts.
There will still be ways to make money and "invest" into CS skins, but people won't be nearly as priced out of nice things as they were. It's also true that people lost a lot of trust on Valve with this update, idk how much that will affect the market long term. But let's be honest, $20K for a Butterfly Emerald was ridiculous, 500$ for some random below average gloves in terrible condition was even more ridiculous.
I know a lot of people are upset right now, I also lost money of course. But even as a skincel myself I can say this is a game, not a stock portfolio. Was this the best way to drive prices down for high tier items? I'm not sure, maybe there were better ways, either by releasing old golds in new cases or just increasing the amount of case drops you get per week. But I've been saying for months that I think Valve want to discontinue cases in the long-term, and if that's true, those 2 options weren't realistic. If they did it this way, there's for sure a reason behind it we don't know yet.
Overall, what do you rate this new CS2 Update from 0-10 and why?
Rare Special Item Trade-ups - The Great Reset
This will be a rather long text in which I ramble about the update, so buckle in:
Todays update has seen the most severe changes the skin ecosystem had to endure since the introduction of Tradelock in 2018.
People got a harsh reality check why skins are considered a high-risk asset. For too long, it was considered an infinite moneyglitch with no downsides.
For those unaware, Valve has introduced a trade-up feature for rare special items (Gloves/Knives) by using 5 skins of the covert rarity grade.
At the same time, Valve has also adjusted the way trade-ups work in general, factoring in the floatcaps of not only the potential outcome but also the inputs. @BrongoCS has made a great summary of the changes if you wanna read up on them further.
[Sooo… what now?]
The obvious impact of this is that the price of Coverts will go up and the price of Knives and Gloves will go down. Pretty obvious.
However, all other case weapon skins will follow the Coverts simultaneously, creating an overall boost in prices and Case ROI.
Hightier knives, especially non-gems, are in a terrible spot and I honestly wouldnt be surprised to see -80% crashes. The same goes for expensive FN Gloves, eventho the new tradeup formula might protect them slightly.
Overall, the spread between Coverts and Knives/Gloves overall, as well as the spread between cheap and expensive Knives/Gloves will decrease significantly.
[Why did Valve do this?]
While I can only speculate on this topic, to me, the only logical explanation is that they want more items back on the Steam Community Market. As the $2,000 limit is a legal threshold in the US which they can not increase, bringing down skin prices is the only other treatment.
This is in line with recent updates such as the Trade Protection (which does not affect items purchased on the SCM) and like the Genesis Uplink Terminal, which focuses much more on buying skins directly with Steam wallet funds.
I dont think theres any legal or regulatory background to this, as trade-ups are just as much like gambling as cases.
In my opinion, the benefits for Valve will be greater control over the ecosystem, the ability to collect more fees, and a wider variety of skins for users to choose from .
[Are skins dead? Is trading over?]
No.
While today has seen significant financial losses across all big traders in the market - me included - I view it as some kind of cleansing.
Ever since the introduction of tradelock 7ish years ago, we have been in more or less an up-only economy, which had its peak in multiple rounds of price manipulation, most noticeably showcased in the recent surge in price amongst cheaper gloves and playskins.
People forgot risk exists, made huge deals on tiny margins, speculated more and more and thought they would end up with generational wealth.
Todays prices reflect a much healthier skin market, where actual players can afford most items and do not have to spend multiple monthly salaries on a slightly more vibrant knife.
Although chaos, panic and uncertainty will dominate the coming weeks, this could be another 2018 moment, which could be followed by years of organic growth resulting in a more healthy and stable market, something we have not experienced for multiple years.
Thanks for reading.
The NEW Tradeup Formula
@SpectralOwl and I have discovered alongside other players there’s one NEW step to the tradeup formula.
Every input has its float weighted to its float cap.
For example, if an item has a 0.01 float in a 0-0.1 float cap, its tradeup float is 0.1 (10x)
Wonder about the impact of the new trade-ups?
There are ~20 million coverts (excluding knives and gloves).
Even if you traded up every single lower-tier skin to a covert, it only adds ~9M more.
In the worst-case scenario, if all ~29M of those Coverts were traded up, it would roughly double the supply of Knives & Gloves from ~5.5m to ~11m.
However, that would require every single skin to be traded to a Knife/Glove. It is more likely that the total supply increases far less.
new blog post finally out!!
Breaking the Steam Scam - how I disrupted one of the largest Steam phishing operations, best known from their fake "50$ gift" Discord spam campaigns.
https://t.co/daizvotSHI