Board Thread:Wiki discussions and announcements/@comment-1990160-20140521040036/@comment-4022742-20140523133153

Okey, so I didn't really want to go into this, but now that the argument has been made that there is a double soft cap on movement speed I feel like I have to.

Buying armor and magic resistance give their flat statistics that gives you a certain value for your gold. But it's actual effect in game is the reduction of their respective incoming damage types by a percentage. And like anything percentage based, that value is multiplicative so it has diminishing returns. Say you start out with 0 armor and you buy, that means you purchased 50% physical damage reduction at the price of 2200 gold. But what if you buy another, you spend another 2200 gold for 16.66% damage reduction. The price for that physical damage reduction roughly went from 44G/% to 132G/%, that's an increase of 300%.
 * 100AR = 50% Reduction (One Half)
 * 200AR = 66.66% Reduction (Two Thirds)
 * 300AR = 75% Reduction (Three Fourths)
 * 400AR = 80% Reduction (Four Fiths)

When you then take into account effective health and calculate it with the premise of having 1000 health and getting hit by something with 100 AD, death in 10 attacks. Buying armor gives you 50% reduction stalling death by 10 attacks for a total of 20 attacks. Each 100 armor gives you another 10 attacks longer to live. But when you look at it from what you are actually getting with diminishing returns it looks like this: So at 1000HP and 300AR you will die to 100AD in 40 attacks, but what if instead of spending that 2200 gold on, and instead bought for 2830g? You'd have 2000HP and 200AR resulting in death to 100AD in 60 attacks. So buy spending 630 more gold for 1000 health would allow you to take 200% more damage, instead of the 133% damage you could take with 100 more armor.
 * 0% Reduction; Death in 10 attacks.
 * 50% Reduction; Death in 20 attacks. +100%
 * 66% Reduction; Death in 30 attacks. +50%
 * 75% Reduction; Death in 40 attacks. +33%
 * 80% Reduction; Death in 50 attacks. +25%

That is what gold efficiency is to me, how effectively I spent my gold to get what I want (more resilience in the example). In no way is that getting expressed in the current way we calculate it, because it ignores diminishing returns entirely. In my opinion, it should not be called "Gold Efficiency" at all, but rather "Statistical Comparative Value" which it actually is.