Board Thread:Wiki discussions and announcements/@comment-3308937-20150122092301/@comment-24981764-20150126221130

Ntoulinho wrote: There is more to cost than Gold there is also Slots.

There is more to benefit than Stats here I will not enumerate.

That is why I contest translating stats into gold. Yes, but if you can also translate abilities into gold, then it's no problem, right? Or, well, there's the slot thing, but I feel like that's relatively minor given that there are 6 slots for main items (it matters for trinkets and summoner spells (which are also sort of like items)). Compare that to abilities, such as the slow from randuin's omen or the ghost effect from the twin shadows. Translate that into gold (or value of some sort), and you can more completely describe an item in terms of its value.

By the way I like the way this discussion is going - towards the whole thing with formulas. Calculations with lots of variables ftw!