More Midas, More Problems

                Is midas really worth it? This item embodies many of the great aspect of DOTA. Are you behind in farm? Grab a midas.  Are you really far ahead from the 6-15 minute mark? Grab a midas. Your game has degenerated to a farming war? Grab a midas. The opposing team is going to pressure your towers from the 10 minute mark on? Don’t grab a midas. The item itself represents an investment of time and gold which you hope will pay back dividends in the future. Once purchased, the repayment period for the midas is 11 uses or 16 minutes & 40 seconds. Assuming that a player is averaging 400 gold per minutes (gpm) prior to purchasing it, the initial time investment 2050 gold / 400 gpm = 5 minutes 7 seconds to farm it. Let’s assume that our hero continues to farm 400 gpm plus their newly acquire midas - who’s added gpm is 2050 gold/16.66 minutes = 123 gpm. This makes for a grand farming total of 523 gpm. This changes the 16 minute and 40 second payback period to a true repayment period of 2050 gold / 523 gmp = 3 minutes and 55 seconds. To sum it up, the time it would take to save enough gold to purchase a midas and then farm up enough gold to where it paid for itself would be 9 minutes and 3 seconds. A player gains or loses about a minute for each 100 gpm difference from the baseline case of 400 gpm.

                With all these numbers, let’s try to make sense of what’s going on. The initial time investment is the period of time when the player is working toward getting their item. This is the point when the player is most vulnerable to having their farm disrupted. Each minute of decreased gpm, from deaths for example, during this period adds another minute that the game must go on in order for the midas to generate value. The repayment period is the amount of time that the game has to go on for the midas to break even. It needs another use after that (100 seconds) to generate value. Therefore the game must go on for 18 minutes and 20 seconds for the midas to turn a net profit in isolation. The true repayment period of the midas represents the aggregated affect the item has on a players farming with a players gpm. Finally there is a roughly 9 minutes of cost to break even on time investment that is, to have 2050 gold again.

All these tangibles are important to understand when thinking about purchasing a midas. If you won’t have about 5 minutes of uninterrupted farm, it doesn’t make much sense to purchase a midas because it will push back the true repayment period, delaying your relevance in the game giving. The repayment period gives us an idea of how long the game needs to last from point of purchase it to have a positive return on investment. If the game ends before the 16 minute and 40 seconds window is up, you would have been much better off purchasing a different item which would have improved your hero in some way other than gpm and slight attack speed increase. If the game does go the distance of 18 minutes and 20 seconds from point of purchase, then the true cost of the midas is what we need to worry about. This tells us how long after the purchase of the golden hand we can expect to start getting other items and begin impacting the game in a more noticeable way.

Many of the things discussed here are tangible and easy to quantify. There are still many aspects of the midas worthy of discussion, like the impact of the extra experience or the increase in the value of a creep wave, but weren’t touched on here. The inspiration for this post is to get a rough idea on the worthiness of purchasing the golden hand and a starting point for making sound decisions. Obviously I can’t factor in every variable; however a baseline has been established and will be built upon. Below I have provided a table and graph for quick reference when deciding to purchase a midas.

Player GPM:	Initial Investment	Player GPM with Midas	True Repayment time	Total Time invested
100	20:30	223	09:12	29:42
150	13:40	273	07:31	21:11
200	10:15	323	06:21	16:36
250	08:12	373	05:30	13:42
300	06:50	423	04:51	11:41
350	05:51	473	04:20	10:11
400	05:07	523	03:55	09:03
450	04:33	573	03:35	08:08
500	04:06	623	03:17	07:23
550	03:44	673	03:03	06:46
600	03:25	723	02:50	06:15
650	03:09	773	02:39	05:48