GamerPay Skins School Lesson 3: Floats

Lesson 3: Floats

Welcome to our third rendition of our GamerPay Skins School!
Today we talk all about FLOATS!

High floats, low floats, special floats and everything else that you can know from
Factory New to Battle-Scarred!

Did you ever ask yourself what exactly is a float cap? Do my skins change looks when I play with them for longer?
Is the wear and tear for every skin the same?

Let us take a look at floats, and for you to understand them better thanks to our Professor Asger Yde!

Check out the video on our YouTube!

Floats

All CSGO skins except vanilla skins have a float ranging from 0-1.
The float value can significantly affect how a skin looks like.
But how severe the change of the skin affected is, really depends on the skin itself! 
0 being the lower, while 1 being the higher float.

But technically the highest float is capped at “0.99999988079071”, so you cannot actually get a float of “1”.

Not only do the high-float skins have a demand, but the low-float skins also have an entire niche market, since there are a lot of people collecting low-float skins, not necessarily because of the look, but simply because of the rarity of the items.

There are 5 different conditions a skin can have, and the condition of a skin is classified by float, or skin wear as some people refer to it.

Difference in wear

Some skins like the AWP | Dragon Lore show clear signs of a high float, with different scuffs and destroyed spots around the skin. However, other skins like the AWP | Medusa or the AK-47 | The Empress do not get any more worn, they just become darker.

Here is an example of that starting with the Dragon Lore in FN and BS.

Now that we covered the D-Lore, let us take a quick look at how the Medusa behaves with its float in FN and BS.

Here we can spot the difference between Factory New and Battle-Scarred on the two skins quite easily.

The Dragon Lore gets quite worn and torn, while the Medusa just has a slight change and darkening in its colour.
This also gave it the nickname of “Green Witch”.
CS players love their little nicknames, such as “Blackiimov”, “Green Witch” or even “Scar Pattern”.

Float Cap

Most skins also have what is called a capped float, meaning that the float can only be obtained in a specific float range.

The AK-47 | Redline cannot be obtained in Factory New, as the lowest possible float for this skin is 0.10.
Since a skin has to have a float lower than 0.07 to be Factory New, it is virtually impossible to get this skin in a Factory New condition. The highest float possible for an AK-47 | Redline is 0.70.

Another example is the AWP | Asiimov.
This skin's float ranges from 0.18 - 1, meaning that this skin cannot be obtained in Factory New or Minimal Wear, as the float would have to be lower than 0.15 for this to be possible. 

An interesting fact about the AWP | Asiimov in particular, is that there is an entire market for the high-float version of this skin.
When the AWP | Asiimov has a float of 0.95 or greater, the community has nicknamed it the Blackiimov, as the look on the skin changes completely. The scope turns black, and the skin gets a really cool overall look.

The float can also be capped in both directions, take the AWP | Fade for example, which is capped at 0.08, meaning that the skin can only be obtained in Factory New and Minimal Wear.

There is currently no way of checking the float caps in-game, but external sites like CSGOStash have a whole database where all the float caps are listed for the different skins.
Most, however, are capped kind of in the middle, most of the time around 0.06 - 0.8.

Do my skins get more worn when I play them?

Many people, especially new users who begin to play CS think that skins get more worn over time if you play with them, meaning that the float number increases.

However, this is only a myth, and the float will remain the same forever.
There is nothing you can do to change the float of the skin you have. 

So, unfortunately, you will not be able to turn a normal Asiimov into a Blackiimov. 

Conclusion

There are quite a few skins that have a special wear and tear in CSGO.
Make sure you check out the skins you like.

If you are lucky they just become darker and you can save a pretty penny while shopping for them in a higher wear on GamerPay.gg!

And that wraps up the third lesson from GamerPay Skins School. We hope you learned something new about Counter-Strike skins and their floats.