Board Thread:League of Legends discussion/@comment-26236254-20170129115835/@comment-33223739-20171001042446

It's sort of like with SI units. They've been somewhat arbitrarily determined, but something had to be used to determine value so it could be measured at all. Hell, look at the Fahrenheit scale.

It's a fairly elegant method to measure a value based on the smallest individual item rather than to pull an average across all items. More elegant and, in a lot of ways, more accurate. Let's use an example with shopping since it's pretty much an equivalent.

Say you're shopping for dice. They're sold in standard packs (5), by the dozen (12), and by the gross (144). A standard pack's $1, a dozen's $2, and a gross is $17.

Individual die cost, then, is 20¢ in standard, 16.7¢ per dozen, or 11.8¢ per gross. The average among all three makes the average die 12.7¢, assuming all three sizes are sold with equal frequency.

So then the question is: do we say the person buying the standard pack is being ripped off, paying almost twice what the dice are worth? Or do we say that the person buying the gross is getting a good deal?

As a side note, a bit about human psychology. We want to feel like we're getting a good deal. Always. So even in a game, we want to look like we're making the best choices. As such, we find this small item and base value around it. Then, we base everything around its value in order to make our later choices seem better. So by using the small, relatively expensive items as a baseline, we give ourselves a psychological boost when we buy the much more expensive item that rewards us by charging us less per unit.

You also see it with buying Riot Points. They make it so that the more money you spend, the more Riot Points you buy, but at an accelerated rate. $10 buys more than twice what $5 will get you. What's a riot point worth? We determine it from the $5 price and say that the amount over in the $10 is 'bonus'. And that actually makes us feel better about spending more. After all, we actually saved money in the long run. Assuming we'd shell out the cash in the long run anyway.