Board Thread:Wiki discussions and announcements/@comment-4881935-20140514222931/@comment-1330314-20140519055931

Not to be rude, but all of this is pretty much a one-man crusade on a concept that is, by your own admission, ill-defined. What would be your definition of gold value? Would it not be better to have a discussion on the meaning of gold value before launching into all of these measures, which are clearly not universally accepted?

I would personally define the terms as the following: the gold value of an item is the sum total of the value of all of the stats and bonuses it is providing at the time of measurement. By extension, the gold efficiency of an item would be its gold value relative to its cost. An easy example of how this makes our views of gold value and gold efficiency differ would be, whose many different bonuses can all be assigned a precise gold value:

By your rationale, Rageblade is 75% gold efficient, and would only be gold efficient if its passives are worth at least 650g total. From both your and my viewpoints, those are true statements. However, from my point of view, it is also incomplete, because I consider the gold value of Rageblade to be variable: if you get so much as one stack of the first bonus, you get 220 gold's worth of stats (+4% attack speed and +4 ability power). Whether or not these stats are temporary is irrelevant, because you are measuring the gold efficiency of the item at a given time, and at that time you will have a certain amount of AD, AP and AS from Guinsoo's. All of these stats, temporary or not, are all equivalently real when it comes to providing bonuses: my item is telling me that I have +32% attack speed and +32 ability power from autoattacking this target, which provides a real combat bonus and has a real gold value, but your analysis is telling me that these stats don't really exist, or at least don't really have the value they possess. The same goes for the passive, which on stats alone is worth 1381 gold. You can say that this effect is only temporary or limited by a conditional, but the matter remains that at a given time I have 1381 gold's worth of stats.

The thing is, if you want to go back to the roots of what counts as value, you're going to end up with the same thing: if you're evaluating the usefulness of a product or a machine, you're going to be basing your evaluation on a measurement of their value at a given time, not just on their prescribed initial value. The same goes here: it makes little sense to assign a constant gold value on an item when it can provide quantifiable bonuses in certain situations. Noting the gold value of an item in a given situation is itself accurate (if the item has stats, you can assign them a precise gold value), correct (you truly do possess whatever stats you have in the given situation, both permanent and temporary), and informative (noting the value of a stack or item active informs readers as to how powerful the item in question becomes in certain situations and can influence their build decisions).

Obviously, what I'm saying is not something you're meant to take at face value, but I really do think there needs to be a proper discussion on the official meaning we want to give to gold value and gold effiency if we want to set any kind of strict rules regarding cost analysis. I personally believe that adding the information you don't want to put on the articles would in fact be quite positive, and would still be consistent with respect to the meaning of gold value and efficiency.