League of Legends Wiki:Discussions/Gold Efficiency

Disclaimer: This is the third thread on this subject. The last two threads have had to be closed because nothing productive has come out of them and both have dissolved into users personally attacking each other and not furthering the discussion. I am taking the reins of this discussion and if a comment does not adhere to our discussion policies or I feel as though it is adding nothing meaningful to the conversation I will remove it without hesitation. This is getting out of hand that we can not have a civil discussion without it coming down to something like this

What are we discussing
Changes to the gold efficiency section of item pages.

Why are we discussing this
Thread:1120532 started this. In summary, User:ClariS and User:Willbachbakal had a personal disagreement in regards to what stats we should or can find a gold value for and some basic wording things, for more info please see that thread and, potentially, the second thread which can be found here: Thread:1122267. Please use these threads as a way of learning more about the subject, do not continue discussions from them here.

What are we going to do
Obviously there is a lot of disagreement about not only whether or not the gold efficiency section should stay on the wiki but also as to if it does stay should it remain the same as it was, should be changed in favor of including stats that don't have a set gold value or should it be redesigned completely.

What are my thoughts?
As per my post in the second thread I believe that the gold efficiency section should be redesigned to something that isn't so black and white and should use softer terms as to not sound so definite. The section as it was not only misleads users but has brought criticism upon us from a couple of sources.

 To see my post click the show button to the right: Gold efficiency the way we were doing it was too black and white and too emphasized on if the item is efficient or not.

I believe that the section should not be designed around whether or not the item is "efficient" and we should not be throwing around definite terms like that regardless of whether we had values for all the stats or not. Instead I propose that we focus more on just providing a gold value for the stats we can and use less severe yes/no only terms to make the point that the point of the section is just for giving gold values to compare with other items, not for determining the items worth as a whole.

This would allow us to continue to deliver data in its purest form to users and allow them make their own analysis's off of it instead of us providing it for them in the form of "oh, well, this item is 110% cost efficient while that one is only 102%, obviously the first one is the better buy all the time" which is something that some players do. We can still give values to certain stats but we don't have to feel obliged to try and give values to the ones we don't/can't that end up skewing the data with assumptions/estimates.

Some other things to discuss:
 * How we calculate gold efficiency, currently we use the least efficient item as our base, this means using long sword for AD and amp tome for AP.
 * Back in my day (3+ years ago) we used the most efficient basic item for a stat, that's how everyone did it, players and Rioters alike, this meant using B.F. sword for AD, recursive for attack speed, blasting wand/NLR for AP, etc. This would make things like amp tome not "gold efficient," which to us made sense.
 * Should we even list the "total value"
 * We can still call it cost analysis without throwing in a "total value," especially for items where some of the stats we can't give a value for which means we aren't really giving a "total." As I said before we could find different terminology or scrap it all together."

Discussion

 * I will start this off by referring to my "what are my thoughts" section. A happy middle ground between removing it and keeping it is by changing what it is fundamentally into a pure stat section.   03:46, May 24, 2014 (UTC)