Everything You Need to Know About Checking Wear on CSGO Marketplaces
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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a good base to build on its popularity – it has grown on an acknowledged franchise with million fans worldwide. Beside tuning up the visual quality to get closer to modern-day standards and conjuring rehashes that would not change the gameplay in a drastic way, Valve had to come up with a feature that would make CSGO different than its previous incarnations. Weapon skins might have just done the job.
The hype is undeniable – the skins proved to be a great way for the community to take part in building the CSGO world, they are discussed far and wide (even having dedicated YouTube reviews) and the global market for skins has created its own economy, to a point where it was once used by black market parsers to launder money, which Valve fought strongly with severe regulations and trade limits.
Skins come in many different variants. They can be pasted with stickers, they come in different types of rarities and different wear levels, which all influence their price greatly. The focus of this article is to show how one can check skin wear on CSGO marketplaces and use it to consciously evaluate the skin’s price.
What is CSGO skin wear?
Skin wear is a statistic that is responsible for the actual visual quality of the skin. It is represented by a float value in a way that minimal float – closest to zero – means the purest skin look. The higher the float value (meaning the closer to 1.0), the more visual damage there is to the skin. You can read more about wear tiers in our previous article. The range of wear and its effect changes from skin to skin, as usually, the skin designer decides how it works for a given skin. There are some skins that represent paint jobs which can be torn down almost completely, like in the case of AWP | Atheris. Others, like Flip Knife | Autotronic will retain details but will get murkier.
The general rule is that the lower the float, the more expensive the item. As you might guess, every rule has its exceptions, and so does this one. Sometimes items with higher float and more rough look are considered to be visually superior to their clean counterparts, thus gaining more demand and consequentially raising their price. That’s the case with M4A4 | Evil Daimyo, where the mid wear is the least pricey, while Battle-Scarred and Minimal Wear reach similar prices.
It’s useful to know how to check wear on CSGO marketplaces to make an informed decision about the price of your items. At first glance, the float value is neither displayed nor represented by the item icon.
How to check skin wear on CSGO Marketplaces?
There are several ways to check wear on CSGO marketplaces. For some time now it’s possible to view it in the details of an item in Steam Community Market. Back before it was possible, third party marketplaces would provide this service with their market handling, so it was preferable to log in to such a marketplace and deposit your items to know their exact wear level. Currently, there are numerous services that will allow you to check the wear level without depositing your items, but will still require you to log in with your Steam account – just be careful and watch out for extortions and thefts. However, if you plan to trade straight away, most marketplaces will allow you to do this within their service.
Where can you check CSGO wear level?
If you type “CSGO marketplaces check wear” into any web search engine, many possible websites will show, but not all of them are secure. An example of a fan-led, yet reliable service is CSGO Exchange, which has over 1 million registered users. They offer a wide range of tools to help you evaluate the price of your items. They also have a marketplace module, but they mediate the trade by exchange coins.
Nowadays, checking CSGO wear on marketplaces is an industry’s standard and every well-established third party site with CSGO items will provide mechanics for this within their user interface. Below is a preview of how wear level is displayed on Skinwallet Market.
Not only its speeds up the process of evaluation but it also allows you to quickly view what are you about to buy if you’re interested in some offers from a given marketplace.
Does skin wear worsen with time?
The word “wear” might suggest otherwise, but actually no, it doesn’t. It’s not a reality simulator, there’s no perma-death and displaying impermanence is not the focus point of this game. Wear level is an aesthetic feature that brings variety and more referable aesthetics to the various, colorful skins that could just look very out of place if only presented in mint condition. There are websites that offer a sort of “upgrade” of your skins, which would implement you could improve the wear of your item, but in the end, it’s just a gamble with what you have for a chance of getting something better, but the chance is not always in your favor. There is also no way to “repair” high float, it’s fixed to a given copy of a skin.
Summary
There’s more to skin wear and float than just simple black and white division for cheap and expensive, as it heavily depends on trends. To go about it, it’s good to know the exact float value except for the wear tier. We’ve shown the importance of checking wear on CSGO marketplaces or with other services for the ability to evaluate your item’s price properly. This knowledge and a little research into the market can help you get the best price for what you have.
