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Note that even within the wear grades, there's still room for variation, which is where the decimal values come in. Since these exact numbers are not only invisible* but also a bit of a mouthful, they're separated into grades: Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn, and Battle-Scarred (in order from least to most worn). Most skins have a range of wear values that starts at 0.00 and ends somewhere between 0.70 and 0.99, although there are quite a few skins that don't follow this rule. Wear values never change over time - a skin keeps its exact same wear value forever, no matter how often it's used. No matter what kind of skin it is, each and every one will have a "wear value." This is a modifier to each skin that affects exactly how the skin actually appears. Many people elect to keep their Souvenir weapons and not to sell them, so note that they'll generally be quite expensive. During a game, special weapon cases will be randomly awarded to spectators these cases contain a random Souvenir weapon, plus several special stickers for the tournament and the two teams playing in the game. Each Souvenir weapon has a message on it commemorating the game during which it dropped. Souvenir weapons are special weapons that drop randomly during large CS:GO tournaments to people watching the games.
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Note that if a Stat-Trak skin gets listed on the community market, the kill counter will reset if you're buying one of these, you won't get any of the previous owner's glory. They feature a small LED display on the gun that tracks kills made by the gun's owner. Stat-Trak weapons function much like Strange weapons from Team Fortress 2 or Dota 2. Stat-Trak and Souvenir skins are two different ways to show off. Normal skins are, obviously, normal - they're the baseline for the other two categories, and don't have any special characteristics or properties. All skins come in Normal, but no skin comes in both Souvenir and Stat-Trak, and some don't come in either. Skins come in three general varieties: Normal, Stat-Trak, and Souvenir. I'm also not going to touch stickers here, but I might add that in later. As a result of that, I'm going to leave out knife skins because I don't think the people who would be interested in this guide would necessarily have $50+ to blow on a fancy skin for a single weapon.
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I'm sure the stuff detailed below is blisteringly obvious to most people, but this guide isn't for most people. This is a really basic guide meant to point out some of the things about skins and the buying/selling thereof that might be useful to people who are brand new to the game and don't know exactly how skins work. Recently, I finished outfitting all of my guns (well, almost all of them) with skins, and there were a bunch of things I found out along the way that I probably would've done differently if I'd known about them beforehand.
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