Weapon Trading In Counter-Strike

There are many things to look out for when you are trading. Here are some of the things you should be aware of and things to take notes of: phishing, profiting, fair deals, fake screenshots, patterns, knowing your prices, and scamming. What do all of these mean?

All of them have a different meaning in the trading world of Counter-Strike. Here is a website that I use to maximize my trading potential in Counter-Strike.

Phishing

What is “phishing”? Phishing is an attempt of scam that hacker and or botters trying to get your information. How do they get your information? They’ll get your information by sending you a fake link that looks like the real link. This is what the real Steam link should look like: steamcommunity.com

Here’s a picture of what a hacker or bot will send you.

Look at the website, they switched up the spelling in the link and made it seem like its the real one, they want you to click the link so you can sign in, that's when they'll get your information. Most of the time if the offer looks too good to be true, it is. Don’t fall for it. I’ve been a victim of this situation myself when I first started trading. If you were victim to this phishing, please contact Steam support and tell them you’ve been hacked. If it’s your first time being hacked they will do a full restore your account and bring your items back, previous to being hacked.

One item in the Market

What does this mean? This mean that’s a person from the weapon trading community is trying to take advantage of the others. They look for people that are new to trading and are trying to make it seem like a weapon is worth a lot, but in reality worth like a $1 or $2. Take a look at these pictures. I got an offer on one of my weapons on the website CS:GO Lounge. Here's what it looked like, keep in mind my item was worth about $100:

When I checked the prices on the market this is what showed up.

See how the average price of the item is only about $4.74? And 6 of the items were bought? Well that 6 is from the same person, they're trying to clear the market place of that section so they can take advantage of that section. Take a look at the next picture:

See how people listed the items? They're trying to look for over $100's of dollars from you from an item that cost $4, if not less.

Patterns

What are patterns? In the Counter-Strike trading world there are specific patterns and colors that are rare on a specific type of skins. The better coloring or pattern you have on that weapon the more it is worth on the market. What are those skins that have rare pattern/coloring?

Case Hardened: The more blue it has on it the better. There are no specific patterns for this individual skin

Fade: Most people look for “Full Fade” In the first picture you can see the coloring is on the whole knife so that is considered “Full Fade”. Now look at the second picture. You can see that on the bottom, its missing some color. The rarity on “Fades” is the more color it has the more value it is worth.

Slaughter: For the slaughter pattern people look for the pattern “Diamond”. They also look for a pattern called “Phoenix/Angel”. I don’t know much about the slaughter but here is a picture on the rarity of the skin “Slaughter”

(Credits for the picture http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=247406953 )

The people who wrote this guide are extremely knowledgeable about the patterns on knives, if you want a more in-depth detail check them out.

Crimson Web: What people look for in the skin on the Crimson Web is how big and visual the “Webs” are, the more webs on the knife means they are worth more money and are more profitable. As you can see in the picture, there is 1 huge web and one small next to it.

 

Screenshots

Why should we be careful of screenshots? You should be careful of screenshots because people take fake screenshots. How does this happen? People will look for any way to take advantage of you. How this happens is in the past they had a high end rare pattern knife (see above for rare patterns). They have these screenshots saved and when they link you screenshots of the knife, it’ll look nice and look rare, but in reality when you trade and you see it yourself in game it’s all rusty and beat up.

How you can prevent this: You can prevent this by inspecting the knife, look at picture 1 and 2. In picture 1 you can see it says “Flip Knife | Case Hardened” but look at picture number 2 when he shows the back side, you can see it says “StatTrak Flip Knife | Case Hardened. Another way to prevent this is asking to see the knife in game, if they refuse to show it then it’s obviously a scam and you should report him and block communication and proceed to find another trader.

Making a Profit

In the trading community you always want to come out ahead of the trade, you never want to put yourself in the situation where you lose money, always make a profit even if it’s a small amount. Never overpay for the skin you want even if you want it badly. In the trading community whenever you want to upgrade your skin the seller usually asks for an overpay on the skin, that is never worth it! You can always find people that are willing to trade.

How you can make a profit from your skins are:
1) looking for a rare pattern, this means that if you have a rare pattern on your skin, you disregard the market prices and make it worth huge amount more.

2) If you’re downgrading you can ask for an overpay. This can be effective because if they overpay even a slight amount, you can find another trader and get your old skin back so now you have your old skin and a cheap weapon and if you keep doing this procedure you’ll eventually have enough to upgrade to a greater weapon.

 

Conclusion 

Always use this button.

Why? This button is useful because you avoid getting scammed. How this button works is, you're not actually trading with the person, you're sending a trade offer and if they accept it then the trade will successful, and no changes will be made to the trade once sent. So they can't take out items of the trade box or try to switch out the weapons, many people fall for this type of scam and if more people use this button they could avoid getting scammed.

How to get to the trade offer button. First you need to have the person you want to trade with added, then you click on inventory and then trade offers. After those steps you're done!

Happy trading guys, please avoid getting scammed. I'm tired of people that aren't doing anything to help the community, instead they're trying to take advantage of the people that are new, please don't be a victim.

If you guys have any feedbacks or things that I should have covered then please let me know in the comments. I'll try to fix it up.