- Joined
- Dec 18, 2019
You're mostly right, though that only applies to hats unboxed from crates. Crates have pretty much been replaced by cases, and cases will only ever drop unusual variants of items from said cases. Also, for some reason any effects added after ~2016 can only ever be obtained from cases, so those newer effects can only be gotten on a select few hats.
There's also the fact that a lot of effects can only ever be unboxed during specific events - usually Halloween, but in the last few years they've also been doing this during the Summer and Christmas periods as well. And most of these effects are only available during that year's specific event, which is presumably done to encourage whales to unbox more for fear of missing out on getting a specific effect they wanted. Because of these factors, there's a lot of hats that will either never exist, or only have one in existence, which is how you get the utterly insane whales spending thousands on a single virtual hat with a gaudy particle effect attached.
As autism-drenched as that is, it gets even worse once you look into skins. I've spoilered this to avoid giving this thread a terminal chromosomal overdose.
Normally, you can unbox weapon skins from cases, and any skin you unbox has a certain percentage chance to be strange* (Generally believed to be a 12.5% or 1/8 chance), and any skin you unbox will have one of five random wears (Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn, and Battle-Scarred). However, this only applies to skin collections that could be gotten from cases.
Some collections weren't gotten from cases, and were instead rewards when you completed contracts during an old update. These couldn't drop as strange. Instead, the only way you could get these as a strange-variant would be to apply a stat-clock to them, but these could only be applied to the lowest tier, Civilian-grade (AKA Tier 1 or Grey-tier, due to the colour of the item's name).
As a result, if you wanted a strange variant of a higher-tier item, you would have to go through trade-ups, where you trade 10 items of the same tier for 1 item of the next tier up, and this is where things go insane.
*this just means the weapon counts how many kills you've gotten with it, which you'd think would be part of the item by default, but I guess Valve decided to nickel-and-dime you for that too.
To give you an example of how these digital paint jobs can get so expensive, allow me to present you a hypothetical example.
Lets say you wanted a Strange Factory New Top Shelf Minigun, pictured below:
Now, this item is a Commando-grade (essentially Tier 4 or Purple-tier) item from the Gentlemanne's collection. So, in order to get this, you would need to trade up 10 Mercenary-grade (Tier 3./Blue-tier) items from the same collection, and to get one of those you'd need 10 from the tier below that, etc. Essentially, you'd need ONE THOUSAND Tier 1 items from the Gentlemann's collection, and they would ALL need to be Strange in order to guarantee that your final result is also Strange.
Keep in mind that you need to apply a stat-clock to every single Tier 1 item you use for this, since as mentioned previously, these stat clocks can only be applied to Tier 1's. Each of those can currently be bought for roughly $0.62. So just to buy the stat-clocks alone, you'd need to invest $620.00, before even getting a single one of those skins.
And about getting those skins. Even the Tier 1 versions of these Gentlemanne collection skins go for approximately $40.00 - $45.00 each. Just to reiterate, you would need 1000 of these. So that would be $40,000.00 at least, likely more.
That might seem like a lot - unless you're a Saudi prince, most of us don't exactly have that sort of money lying around to spend on a virtual gun. There's a silver lining, however. You don't need to use 10 items from that collection, you only need to use one item from that collection per trade-up. There is a catch though - the percentage chance of you getting a certain collection from a trade-up is relative to how many items you put in from that collection. So if you used 1 item from the Gentlemanne's collection, and then 9 items from, say, the Teufort collection, you'd have a 10% chance of getting a Gentlemanne's collection item of the next tier, and a 90% chance of getting a Teufort collection item of that tier. This also applies to the wears used, and whether or not a strange variant was used. So if, for example, you use 9 Tier 1 non-strange Battle-scarred items from collection X, and 1 Tier 1 strange Factory-new item from collection Y, you have a 90% chance of the trade-up result being a Tier 2 non-strange Battle-scarred item from collection X, and a 10% chance of getting a Tier 2 strange Factory-new item from collection Y.
And you have to gamble like this - there simply isn't enough items from certain collections (such as the aforementioned Gentlemanne's collection) in order to do these trade-ups solely with them, since some of these collections haven't been dropping since 2015. And every time someone does one of these trade-ups, it takes 10 of them out of the system, causing the items to become rarer and more expensive as a result. So you have to mix in items from other collections, meaning that you're always at risk of getting an item from one of the cheaper collections you used in the trade-up, potentially losing thousands of dollars in the process.
This means that if you wanted the Minigun posted above, for every trade-up you do, you have to use at least one strange, Factory New item from the Gentlemanne's collection. And this only gives you a 10% chance of getting the desired trade-up result.
And for reference, even the cheapest Tier 2 strange, Factory New items from this collection go for around $390.00. And you need at least one of these in order to get a 10% chance of getting the Tier 3 item we need, and then you'd need to do another trade-up with that Tier 3 to get a 10% chance of finally getting the Tier 4. So you need to spend at least $390.00 to get a 1% chance of getting the Minigun we mentioned above, and a 99% chance of getting something completely different which could potentially only be worth a couple dollars (or less) if you're really unlucky.
And the best part is, after doing all of this? There's two other Commando-grade items in this collection along with the aforementioned Top Shelf Minigun, and you have an equal chance of getting any of these.
So that 1% chance I mentioned in the last paragraph? I lied, it's actually a 0.33% chance. You still want that Minigun, bro?
Some collections weren't gotten from cases, and were instead rewards when you completed contracts during an old update. These couldn't drop as strange. Instead, the only way you could get these as a strange-variant would be to apply a stat-clock to them, but these could only be applied to the lowest tier, Civilian-grade (AKA Tier 1 or Grey-tier, due to the colour of the item's name).
As a result, if you wanted a strange variant of a higher-tier item, you would have to go through trade-ups, where you trade 10 items of the same tier for 1 item of the next tier up, and this is where things go insane.
*this just means the weapon counts how many kills you've gotten with it, which you'd think would be part of the item by default, but I guess Valve decided to nickel-and-dime you for that too.
To give you an example of how these digital paint jobs can get so expensive, allow me to present you a hypothetical example.
Lets say you wanted a Strange Factory New Top Shelf Minigun, pictured below:
Now, this item is a Commando-grade (essentially Tier 4 or Purple-tier) item from the Gentlemanne's collection. So, in order to get this, you would need to trade up 10 Mercenary-grade (Tier 3./Blue-tier) items from the same collection, and to get one of those you'd need 10 from the tier below that, etc. Essentially, you'd need ONE THOUSAND Tier 1 items from the Gentlemann's collection, and they would ALL need to be Strange in order to guarantee that your final result is also Strange.
Keep in mind that you need to apply a stat-clock to every single Tier 1 item you use for this, since as mentioned previously, these stat clocks can only be applied to Tier 1's. Each of those can currently be bought for roughly $0.62. So just to buy the stat-clocks alone, you'd need to invest $620.00, before even getting a single one of those skins.
And about getting those skins. Even the Tier 1 versions of these Gentlemanne collection skins go for approximately $40.00 - $45.00 each. Just to reiterate, you would need 1000 of these. So that would be $40,000.00 at least, likely more.
That might seem like a lot - unless you're a Saudi prince, most of us don't exactly have that sort of money lying around to spend on a virtual gun. There's a silver lining, however. You don't need to use 10 items from that collection, you only need to use one item from that collection per trade-up. There is a catch though - the percentage chance of you getting a certain collection from a trade-up is relative to how many items you put in from that collection. So if you used 1 item from the Gentlemanne's collection, and then 9 items from, say, the Teufort collection, you'd have a 10% chance of getting a Gentlemanne's collection item of the next tier, and a 90% chance of getting a Teufort collection item of that tier. This also applies to the wears used, and whether or not a strange variant was used. So if, for example, you use 9 Tier 1 non-strange Battle-scarred items from collection X, and 1 Tier 1 strange Factory-new item from collection Y, you have a 90% chance of the trade-up result being a Tier 2 non-strange Battle-scarred item from collection X, and a 10% chance of getting a Tier 2 strange Factory-new item from collection Y.
And you have to gamble like this - there simply isn't enough items from certain collections (such as the aforementioned Gentlemanne's collection) in order to do these trade-ups solely with them, since some of these collections haven't been dropping since 2015. And every time someone does one of these trade-ups, it takes 10 of them out of the system, causing the items to become rarer and more expensive as a result. So you have to mix in items from other collections, meaning that you're always at risk of getting an item from one of the cheaper collections you used in the trade-up, potentially losing thousands of dollars in the process.
This means that if you wanted the Minigun posted above, for every trade-up you do, you have to use at least one strange, Factory New item from the Gentlemanne's collection. And this only gives you a 10% chance of getting the desired trade-up result.
And for reference, even the cheapest Tier 2 strange, Factory New items from this collection go for around $390.00. And you need at least one of these in order to get a 10% chance of getting the Tier 3 item we need, and then you'd need to do another trade-up with that Tier 3 to get a 10% chance of finally getting the Tier 4. So you need to spend at least $390.00 to get a 1% chance of getting the Minigun we mentioned above, and a 99% chance of getting something completely different which could potentially only be worth a couple dollars (or less) if you're really unlucky.
And the best part is, after doing all of this? There's two other Commando-grade items in this collection along with the aforementioned Top Shelf Minigun, and you have an equal chance of getting any of these.
So that 1% chance I mentioned in the last paragraph? I lied, it's actually a 0.33% chance. You still want that Minigun, bro?
