Wow, okay. Riot, look.

FINAL EDIT: I wrote this when I was upset. While I still hold the views I express here, I apologise if I was crass or rude in their delivery. I would like to start a different, more meta dialogue rather than one that just involves game assets: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/miscellaneous/UIRmkYUm-riotopeli-and-tommy-gnox-groupthink-a-calm-discussion /EDIT

I'm okay with it if you think that the lore needs a rewrite.

I'm okay with it if you think that you want to give champions more agency.

I'm okay with it if you think that ending every lore entry with "and they found the Institute of War" was a bit stifling.

What I'm not okay with is if you feel like the game should be separate from the lore because it restricts the lore, because it's at the expense of giving the player agency. This is not a book. Video games are an interactive medium, and you're taking out the** interactive** part. Removing summoners from canon is a stupid idea that invalidates our presence. We're no longer influential, we hold no stake, you assume that the reason we play is because of the game mechanics alone, and so you're making a terrible decision based off that. A video game is more than what it is mechanically, and League of Legends was a game that was far more than what it was mechanically.

Sure, Uno doesn't have a story or lore to keep us playing, there are only the game mechanics, but Uno is a social game. We play it with friends and family, we play it to bond with them and to have fun with them. We don't play league to bond with our opponents or with our solo queue team mates, so if you remove our agency in this game at the expense of the champions, what do we have left?

We loved that agency because we felt involved with the game. You can't tell us that removing our feeling of involvement is a good idea for the lore, because then you're telling us that the lore is more important than us, your players.

"You're just being entitled," you might say. Okay, maybe I am.

So I'm sorry that thousands of us have sunk millions of dollars and man hours into your game and don't like being subject to your whims alone. I'm sorry that we have literally wasted parts of our lives on your game because it made us feel important. I'm sorry most of all that your team of writers feel like their idea of a better story is more important than the players' idea of a better game.

EDIT: Another thing. I think the lore team has this odd misconception that more things to read about = caring more about the characters. This simply isn't the case.

Take The Legend of Zelda, for example. Link doesn't say a word (beyond HUAAAAA) in the Zelda games, and beyond introductory cinematics we're told little of the characters in their world. Yet, look at the Zelda fanbase, they care deeply about Link and Zelda and Ganon, to some extent - not because they were given a chapter of their background stories to read, but because of how the players affect the world when they play as these characters. Sure, there might be exposition mid-way through the game, but it's more for flavour than it is necessary to comprehend the characters.

We don't need the Institute and Summoners retconned out of canon. Riot Opeli, if you truly do want us to care more about the characters, and if that's the goal of this whole retcon, then you're going about it the wrong way. We need to be made more relevant to the lore, not less. You could write an entire novel without us in it and it wouldn't matter as much as if you simply engaged us in the story, because this is a video game.

EDIT AGAIN: Have any of you played StarCraft? I remember why I started playing League now. The original StarCraft involved you, the player, as an agent in its plot. You are a part of everything unfurling: the fall of an entire species, the rise of another and everything in between. StarCraft II didn't have that. Its writing is absolute rubbish - not entirely because the player is no longer a character in the game, but definitely partly so. League offered that to me again, but now you're taking that away.

StarCraft is a paragon of interactive storytelling, StarCraft II is not. Please, if anything, follow the former in its execution, not the latter.