Thread:ClariS/@comment-98.201.177.181-20130104231418/@comment-75.143.77.86-20130106190006

The problem is that how much gold a stat is worth is ill defined. You know how much of a stat you can buy though tier 1 items, but this does not assign an innate price to that stat. The extra step of taking that factual number you took from the game (stats / price) and saying it's the same as a potentially different abstract number (the "value" of the stat) is a mistake.

This is an idea I failed to demonstrate with my previous example. It could be that this idea will be insufficient to change your mind, but I would like to at least get the idea accross to you.

Pretend you're designing a MOBA. In this MOBA you will have the following items:

Rifle: +50 damage

Hat: +50 health

Gunhat: +200 damage and +200 health

Shotgun: +300 damage

When designing this game, you'll want to somehow analyze the relative merits of the Gunhat and the Shotgun. You'll want to do other things as well, but this is one of the things you want to do. When comparing the gunhat and the shotgun, let's look at some different ways the items can be priced:

Scenario 1: R: $140 H: $160 G: $1000 S: $800

Scenario 2: R: $160 H: $140 G: $1000 S: $800

In these two scenarios, the Gunhat and the Shotgun have the same price. What actually changed in terms of player choices? Well, they have different options when it comes to padding their inventory with small items early game, but late game they will still have some combination of larger ones. The cheap items aren't a real substitute here because of their abysmal slot efficiency; considering them as a replacement isn't comparing like with like.

But we can still try the same type of gold value analysis here that people are doing with league. Doing so, we get

Scenario 1: G value: $1200, S value: $840

Scenario 2: G value: $1200, S value: $960

That's odd. This is telling us that the price change makes the shotgun into a better item than it was before. Can we change the price to make it even better?

Scenario 3: R: $200 H: $100 G: $1000 ($1200 value) S: $800 ($1200 value)

So these changes we're making to the game which realistically just affect early game choices are having a surprisingly large impact on our heuristic when comparing late game items. That seems inappropriate.