Hey, you just won a Counterstrike: Global Offensive match! Time to shell out a few bucks, unlock that weapon case and see what’s inside, right? Not so fast! You might be better off just buying that ultra-rare knife in the in-game store. Here’s proof.
In the video above, game design commentator and YouTuber 3kliksphilip shows off a simulator he made that shows off how much money you can potentially spend try to randomly acquire one of the elite weapon rewards in the game. At 1:53 in the video, the simulation spends more than $US300 for a version of AK-47 that tops out at about $US232 on the Steam Community Market.
By the time the much-desired Karambit knife shows up in an unlocked case, $US1484.04 of imaginary player cash has been spent. That’s more than three times the current top price of $US400.
The moral of the story? You’re probably better off buying from your fellow players. It will cost less.
Comments
16 responses to “You Probably Shouldn’t Pay To Unlock Counter-Strike Weapon Cases”
what is wrong with people? $100+ dollars for a reskinned gun?
man tell me about it, I’m a long time CS player and the amount of players on CS:GO that froth over this type of crap annoys me.
I don’t care about the skins ingame I just play to rank up, I once opened up one of the sticker capsules just to see what the fuss was about, ended up putting the sticker on a ‘stock’ AK-47.
Few games later I had my whole team giving me a hard time “ERRRR WHY WOULD YOU PUT A STICKER ON A VANILLA GUN HURRR??@?@?@?@” Pretty much the whole game was revolved around the sticker on the stock AK issue.
Man people are retarded.
Meh I don’t mind, I picked the game up for a couple of bucks in the last sale so the way I figure it is that its just balancing out.
There is something addictive about it, but that’s gambling for you and I do wonder how this is necessarily allowed.
You aren’t be rewarded when you win cases, you’re being charged money. ‘Here your reward is to spend $2.50’
What the actual fuck? I just don’t get why you would use all that money on a reskinned gun for a game that makes it easier to see you when your gun is white/purple/any other colour than the normal skins. Not to mention how distracting it is having little flecks of colour bobbing at the bottom of your screen than the usual black/grey/brown.
Spend your time getting better at the game, not trying to win some fancy do reskin.
Exactly. I think it’s a waste of money. Why would you fork out money for nothing more than a cosmetic job on a gun?
I don’t bother swapping the stock skins for reskins. It doesn’t do anything for me tactically or aesthetically.
BTW I have heaps of cases and skins, all unopened and unequipped. 😀
It’s simply injecting a tiny bit of personality and customization into the game. If people want to spend some money, who really cares? It is just worth noting the case opening method of attaining them isn’t really worth it.
Sure if a 15 year old was an idiot and spent their entire savings of several hundred bucks on a knife. That’d be utterly retarded. However it’s rarely the case people are that frivolous or dumb.
Personally I like the look of some of my guns with cammos and so prefer playing with them than the stock guns.
When I am done with them, I can sell them on the steam market place for hopefully not much less than I paid for them, or maybe a profit. Then have the cash in my steam wallet ready to hand over to Gaben next time decides to bless us with a sale.
Screamface you’ve got a point, I think I’m coming from a background where CS was in beta for Half-Life, and then my massive stint (read addiction) for CSS since it launched. I played competitively at one point for a few amateur clans and it just seems to be the joy of CSS should be working as a team, having great aim, out-thinking the opposition and generally playing the game. The whole concept of what amounts to adding TF2 hats to the game just cheapens it imo. I DO absolutely love the model they’ve got for fan created maps though. I’m totally for the season passes etc.
Damnit, all this talk of CS and reminiscing of days yonder is making my index finger itch…
That’s well and good but he doesn’t mention how long it would take to obtain those cases through the game, which would be probably a couple of years worth. If you’re buying the cases to pay to open them looking for a specific weapons is dumb though yeah.
He’s not talking about that, he’s talking about the odds of getting it IF you had the cases. Also the weapons cases often sell for as little as $0.18 a pop so you could add that to the cost of keys if you liked 😉
It would be interesting to see if someone has worked out farming rates though. Is it based on hours played? Matches won? What are the parameters that lead to you getting a reward? I’ve had weeks of nothing when I played heavily, maybe 1 or 2 drops from a couple hours play. Then in one weekend I picked up 2 weapons and 3 cases plus a sticker pack in the space of about 5 hours play. All highly confusing 😛
Not really an issue, excluding brand new cases that come with game updates / events, they can be bought for a few cents on the community market. If you’ve got the cash to shell out on that many keys, buying cases instead of waiting for drops won’t be an issue.
Thats why I said if you are just buying cases to unlock them it’s dumb, not to mention he doesnt factor in the buying of the cases either, granted they can vary but just looking at the marketplace gives you a good indicator of the average price. @ashigaru
The market is limited to only $400 transactions. maybe not for CS4 but for other games with high value cosmetics it’s even more insane on trading sites.
The rate in which valuable things appear is lowering though so the whole thing will soon implode on itself.
Team Fortress 2 says ‘hello’
Opened over sixty cases that i had saved up from matches . It was not worth it.
I’ve made $6 from selling stuff in the 125 hours playtime I have 😛 yes I am unlucky with the drops
I think Valve is extremely smart, they exploit the dumb people, people that have no brains, to get lots of money all over the place. While normal players will see it as a very useless thing, dumb players will see a bunch of useless skins that prove you’re a boring tryhard, as a massive reward that shows how “Cool” you are.
Valve, ya smart yet sneaky little bugger! :3
Well I tried the simulator and got a M9 Doppler 60 cases in. $440 of items from 250 of case opening. Obviously I got super lucky though.
The main point is already made above, you open them for fun/when you have money that you don’t mind losing. I personally mostly buy cheap but nice looking skins under $10, only the really rare/sought after(that are usually pretty ugly) go for more.
I’ve probably payed about 40 dollars for 150 hours of entertainment so that’s worth it for me.