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Things that could have improved the dev blog post

2nd Fiddle·9/6/2014, 9:20:40 PM·4 votes·560 views

This is one of the least well received posts from riot in recent memory(an artist gets downvoted for accepting a compliment, it's depressing). It has been complained about to no end and I, for one, am tired of being angry about the lore.

So here is what I am going to do in this thread. I(and anyone else who wants to post) am going to list things that could have improved(not removed) the negative reaction to the retcon. The only conditions I have are:

  • don't ask for the retcon to be reverted;
  • don't use it to insult the lore team(or anyone upset about the retcon);
  • don't ask for anything too big.

Given those rules, here goes:

  1. A new map of Runeterra without the institute would give a better sense of certainty of what was going to be kept and what was going to be cut without having to commit to to much(plus the current one says Mount Gargantuan, that needs to be updated)

  2. A short story, about anything. The assertion that removing the institute would improve your ability to tell a story would have held so much more weight if a story had actually been told after removing the institute.

  3. A rewrite of the lore for any of the handful of champions whose story centers on the institute. A simple step one that would give us a sense of a plan behind this.

Feel free to add your own ideas.

4 Comments

Zhugan9/6/2014, 11:21:50 PM2 votes

There are some pretty obvious examples, really.

  1. A lot of the stuff in the JoJ (which they say still matters) involved the IoW and summoenrs. They should've been ready to show how those were changed when they made this announcement.

  2. All champions with any reference to the IoW or summoners in their lore should have their bios changed in concurrence with the announcement. That way we have more of an idea of what is going on.

  3. They should have some event to release concurrently with the announcement. Not after. Concurrently. This would show they are working towards building the world and not just removing parts of the world.

  4. In fact, they should've said literally anything of substance other than "we are gonna be able to do more stuff now! ... I mean, we don't actually have anything right now, but we totally will! ... soon...?".

  5. They should've taken our response on how they dealt with Trundle seriously. They should've understood how decisively negative our response would be given how the community responded to Trundle and TAKEN THAT SERIOUSLY. But, in their responses, both in that thread and in others, they were casual to the point of being insulting.

  6. The head of the Lore department should've stepped up when they did this and admitted to a whole lot of the mistakes that were made. Still hasn't. Still don't even know for sure who the head of lore is (its not Kitae anymore).

  7. They should have had a way to show that they were going to continue expanding the lore on a consistent basis (like the JoJ did, but obviously not the JoJ) so that people who are interested in the lore can have that desire sated. That variety of expansion is not allowed to be: context free music videos, context free cinematics, comics with literally not text or context, "consistent" events that have no resolution (see: Freljord), or something we have to pay for. I don't have to pay for the game but I have to pay for the lore? No thanks.

  8. Most importantly, they could've talked with the community in the two years since the JoJ was ended. They could've listened to what the community wanted lore wise before they did this. They could've worked with the community to build the lore into something that made both groups happy while simultaneously removing the IoW as a constraint.

  9. They can start listening to us now and actively minimize the issues that people are currently angry about by actually giving ground to the community. This could mean anything from not doing the retcon (I rate that as basically impossible) to showing us what they are changing: RIGHT NOW.

  10. They can, and should, own up to the fact that this was a decision made to expand the LoL world into another game(s)/book/movie/etc. The IoW made sense in the framework of LoL. In fact, it is the only way to have LoL make sense while also having a functional lore. However, in basically any game or medium it would be a HUGE constraint. I don't care if they announce any other details of those plans, but they should announce that is why they made this decision. In fact, if this isn't true, the only other excuse is laziness. And, if the real reason for this is laziness, they should own up for that and apologize for that, too.

Sneak Dog9/6/2014, 11:58:31 PM2 votes

  1. Listen to feedback while removing the institute. They're going to make mistakes, they already made a mistake in my eyes, my second point.

  2. It is a lore about legends, don't replace champions we're already invested in or else just come out and tell us you want an all new lore (in which case I'd tell them to not even relate it to their old lore, something about respecting the emotional investment so many of us have already).

Yet Trundle has been replaced by a power-hungry brute (compare old lore to in-game presentation, his voice-over). I fear the same for Nocturne, seeing how his main thing is the interesting relationship with Summoners. I'd feel a lot better if Riot is willing to correct mistakes, not only sort of kinda admit that Trundle wasn't received very well and that he might not be the same Trundle. It would take a new voice-over and some mild rewriting how Trundle did the things he did (yep, only mild, they came pretty close in the background only to screw up in the voice-overs) and he's the old Trundle. But as long as this doesn't happen I have no goodwill for the new lore nor faith in the lore department.

In the words of Riot Impetus yesterday:

Trundle is a case where the character was completely envisioned and while I personally like the end result, I think the criticism about whether or not it's still Trundle is fair. Just because we didn't got back on the decision doesn't mean we didn't hear those criticisms.