Board Thread:Wiki discussions and announcements/@comment-1990160-20140521040036/@comment-3308937-20140522034924

My thoughts:

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.

I'll let this post sink in/be discussed before bringing up the finer details like design and terminology use.