In 2015 I submitted the Tec 9 Rekt 9 and it was the highest viewed item in my workshop. This was a blessing and a curse as it was so popular I became afraid to change it.

Throughout the years I went through three separate attempts to tweak it, with some recolours too (faded yellow and deep violet), but each time before I clicked to submit I compared it against the original, and then bottled it...

In December 2015, and again in February 2016 (shortly before the wildfire case went live) it was temporarily marked as incompatible (as were many other workshoppers submissions). My theory is the accident wasn’t that it was marked as incompatible in the first place, but that users were made aware of it being incompatible.

This led me to theorise potential reasons why the submission is not suitable:

• Reason 1: The ‘smiley’ is a trademark
  There have been various lawsuits between the Smiley Company (who own the trademark but were not the original creators of the symbol) and other corporations. Although the original face has dead X’s for eyes and a tongue sticking out I’ve decided to play it even safer. As such I’ve removed that symbol from the reload bolt in the latest submissions.
  
  
• Reason 2: Chinese sensibilities
  You may have noticed there were adaptations of some guns for the new Perfect World branch of the game. This is because many game developers avoid skulls, bones and blood to dodge potential issues with the approval process for use in China. The Perfect world version of the game wasn't public knowledge at the time the item was marked as incompatible, however it could still be forward thinking by the developers to avoid headaches later on.
  
  
• Reason 3: Valve just don't like it.
  ...well, I can't really fix that -- so for now I’ll focus on the other two points!

Two new variations on the original -

• A ‘ROW’ version (revision 2) featuring skulls, bones - but no ‘smiley’ derivatives: there is a new skull symbol on the reload bolt instead; in-turn having a skull made less sense to have blood in the reload groove so this went too.
  
  
• A ‘Universal’ version (revision 1) that features no skulls, no blood, no smiley - but instead a hand drawn face on the rear of the weapon. Note the rear area has to be symmetrical due to the UV map. Also the nozzle of the gun originally featured magenta spray splats - I wasn't taking any chances this could be misconstrued as blood so made it bright orange.

Because the Skulls and bones are best! And they double as a roman numeral for 9 (IX) which I liked… hence two versions.

The original design was early on in my learning of how to create weapon finishes, to make it more real I’ve ‘grubbed it up’ a bit: added scratches, scuffs, cracks, dirt and grime. The original design also predates normals in CSGO weapon skins, as such I’ve thrown in normal map to sweeten the deal - this took a bit more work as the underlying art was a right bloody mess of layers -- I have since changed my layering method!