0.001% in Siege, 0.26% in CS2: How Pack and Case Odds Actually Work

Doktor's Curse is back in Rainbow Six Siege until November 2, and so is the yearly question of how many event packs you're going to open. Everyone gets one free pack on first login during the event, two more sit behind Battle Pass challenges, and the M590A1 Memento Masterpiece costs 4,100 R6 Credits and comes with five event packs, according to Ubisoft's event post.

What that post doesn't give you is the odds. For Siege, that's normal. It's also the biggest gap between opening a pack in Siege and opening a case in Counter-Strike 2, where players have been working from the same published drop rates since 2017.

The 0.001% skin

The drop rate Siege players still quote belongs to Delta Packs. When they arrived with Operation Tenfold Pursuit, SiegeGG reported that the Psychopomp Redeemer, a Limited Edition MPX skin for Valkyrie, drops from a Delta Pack 0.001% of the time. That's one pack in 100,000, out of a pool of 116 items.

Now set that against how many Delta Packs a player could actually collect. SiegeGG estimated somewhere between 19 and 25, coming from Battle Pass tiers and the December login rewards. Even with 25 packs, your chance of seeing the Redeemer was about 0.025%. Roughly one player in 4,000.

Delta Packs also allow duplicates, so a lucky player could in theory pull it twice. A duplicate Redeemer pays out 5,000 Battle Pass points, which is a strange consolation prize for what SiegeGG called the rarest skin in Siege.

Every Siege pack plays by its own rules

Siege has never had one pack that does everything, and the rules change with the pack type.

Alpha Packs were built around a hidden counter. In Ubisoft's Alpha Pack FAQ from 2017, every match you finish adds to a "Chance" rating, and a win adds more than a loss. You only roll after a win. A failed roll carries your Chance over to the next one, and landing a pack resets it to zero. Duplicates were converted into Renown based on rarity. It's a pity system in all but name: the longer you go without a pack, the better your next roll gets.

Bravo Packs, the Battle Pass packs, went the other way and don't give duplicates at all. Delta Packs brought them back. Event packs are tied to the event's own collection. This year's Doktor's Curse items are headgear, uniforms and weapon skins for Grim, Hibana and Mute.

The payment side moved this summer too. Ubisoft's June 30 economy update switched new event packs to R6 Credits only from Season 3, and named M.U.T.E. Protocol: Flesh & Metal and Rengoku as the last events where new collection packs could be bought with Renown. Masterpieces can now be bought outright with R6 Credits, packs included, which is exactly how the Doktor's Curse offer works.

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None of these Ubisoft posts, the 2017 FAQ included, lists item odds. So the Siege numbers players pass around, like the Delta Pack figure, reach most of them secondhand.

CS2 has one table, and it came from a law

Counter-Strike's case odds are public because China made them public. In 2017, Chinese rules required games with loot boxes to disclose drop rates, and Perfect World, Valve's publishing partner in China, posted the numbers for CS:GO.

It didn't post percentages, though. It posted ratios between rarity tiers, and players did the conversion: for every 100 Mil-Spec skins, you get 20 Restricted, 4 Classified, 0.8 Covert and 0.32 knives or gloves. Divide each by the total of 125.12 and you get the table every CS2 player has seen at some point:

Valve hasn't published a different table for CS2, and players still work from these numbers.

That 0.26% means one gold in every 391 cases on average. The rate is flat. Case 391 has the same chance as case one, and nothing like Siege's Chance meter fills up in the background. Open 391 cases and there's still about a 37% chance you haven't seen a knife or a pair of gloves.

CS2 has its own version of the free login pack. Prime accounts get a weekly drop: you're shown four rewards and keep two, and a case can be one of them. The case is free. Opening it isn't.

Each opening needs a $2.49 key from Valve. So 391 tries comes to about $974 in keys before you've paid a cent for the cases themselves. StatTrak makes the math worse: roughly one drop in ten is StatTrak, which puts a StatTrak knife at around 0.026%.

Why the 256x gap isn't the whole story

Put the two headline numbers side by side and a CS2 knife looks about 256 times easier to get than the Psychopomp Redeemer. It isn't quite that simple, because the two numbers measure different things.

The Redeemer's 0.001% is one specific skin. The 0.26% in a CS2 case is a whole category: every knife or glove finish that case can drop, from a Safari Mesh to the finish you actually wanted. Split that 0.26% across all of them and a single specific knife lands a lot closer to Siege territory.

The other difference is what happens after the drop. Every skin that drops from a CS2 case has a price on the Steam Community Market, so odds turn into arithmetic. Multiply each item's chance by its price, add it up, and you get what a case pays back on average, which players then hold up against the key and the case price.

Where per-item odds show up

Valve's numbers stop at the rarity tier. You know a Covert lands 0.64% of the time, but not how likely the specific red skin you're after is.

Case-opening sites go a step further. Skin.Club, for example, shows the drop chance next to every item in a case and runs a Provably Fair system, where the client and server seeds behind each roll are logged so you can check past results yourself.

Nothing in Ubisoft's event post or its economy update comes close. From Season 3 onward, every new event pack costs R6 Credits, and neither post puts a percentage next to a single item. Doktor's Curse runs until November 2. After the login gift and the two challenge packs, every pack you open from it is a paid draw on odds you haven't seen.