What happened to you, Riot?

Riot, you used to be a bunch of DotA fanboys (and girls) who set out to improve upon something you loved, and give it a community your fans could be proud of. You took what resources you could gather and everything you knew about making games, and you crafted a colorful, exciting game full of memorable characters. You reached out to your fans and communicated openly with them about the development of League of Legends, and you tried with every update to incorporate the feedback of the players into your evolving game.

Today, your production values have never been higher, and your content has never been more shallow. Rioters talk to the fans constantly, and manage to communicate with them less than ever. What happened to your integrity?

Let's look at what Riot puts its time into nowadays: Skins New splash art Featured game modes Flashy cinematics Esports competitions New graphics for the website and client

Now, let's take a closer look at it all.

New Skins Skins are one of Riot's biggest moneymakers. Since Riot's creative resources are now so prodigious, they can afford to pump out very impressive-looking skins on a regular basis. Are they pretty? Sure. Are they contributing to the game in any meaningful way? Not really (though that can be considered subjective). Are they making a profit? Definitely. New splash art, website and client graphics Updating these things makes League's older content seem newer at relatively low cost. It helps Riot pull in new players (More people to buy skins!), encourages people to buy champions they haven't considered before (don't wanna save up the IP? Why not buy Akali with RP instead?), and allows the company to dismiss complaints directed at the various failings of both the client and the website (We're working on it, see?). Flashy cinematics Ah, yes, the pride and joy of the new "lore" team. They're certainly very pretty, aren't they? I've been hearing comparisons of Riot's new cinematics to the work of other large companies like Blizzard. But do you know what cinematics do and don't do very well? They don't convey stories very well. They need to be accessible to multiple audiences, so they can't use text or speech to convey a complex plot without limiting who can understand the language. With how much time it takes to render even a few seconds in this visual style, they also can't be very long, so they're severely limited in just how much they can afford to say with the time they have. No, what cinematics do best is make something look good. And the new cinematics make League of Legends look very good, especially to outsiders. People who see the latest videos uploaded to Riot's channel (And not the ones that actually show the gameplay, which are all herded into the LCS channel now) will be swayed now more than ever to try League of Legends and become new customers for RP. Featured game modes (And their accompanying Icons and Ward skins) Have you ever played World of Warcraft? Most long-time players end up spending a lot of their time doing daily quests for gradual rewards. Blizzard can't produce content faster than the players can consume it, so they fall back on repeated content to fill time between releases. Featured game modes are Riot's daily quests. They're there to get you to log in, to show off pretty new summoner icons and ward skins, which you can only buy with RP. They're there to make you think about League when you're sick and tired of Summoner's Rift, and they're there to reel in the attentions of new players (who are often still left clueless by the game's lack of inbuilt new-player support, by the way). Esports Riot's biggest cash cow, Esports could now be termed the "core experience" of League of Legends. Advertising revenue from the LCS is absolutely enormous, and the degree to which it influences Riot as a company shows in just about everything they do. Balance changes are made with the LCS in mind. Advertisements absolutely plaster the website and the client when Worlds rolls around. Esports is perhaps the one facet of League of Legends that virtually never seems to suffer any issues. But it does manage to cripple the experience for everyone else - it plays up League as spectator sport, when it's something that a lot of people find attractive because it's something you can play yourself. It enforces an incredibly boring and stale meta, in a game with well over a hundred characters to choose from now.

You know what goes mostly unaddressed by Riot nowadays? New champion releases, balance patches, server stability, in-depth lore. Champion releases are expensive, and since people can buy them with IP, they're often dragged through development hell for ages before even being hinted at. Patches that significantly affect the game's balance are a risk to professional players, Riot's lifeblood. Problem champions are quietly nerfed and then forgotten about. The NA servers are a mess, and will likely never be fixed, because the LCS is played on LAN. Lore is carefully glossed over by the aforementioned flashy cinematics - The first actual lore write-ups we've seen in ages are the Xerath and Azir stories released over the boards, and these were only posted after people had repeatedly pointed out just how shallow the actual details of the new lore had been.

Riot, I get that you as a company are a collection of people. I know that a ton of you love this game and want to make the best of it. But someone, somewhere up the line clearly doesn't care, because to make your next paycheck you have to fastidiously pump out shallow, glossy new content and keep your mouth shut when the community calls you out on it.

At the end of the day, all I want to see from League of Legends is creativity for creativity's sake. Something that was given resources not because it would guarantee another big payout for Riot games, but because someone thought it would make the players happy, or because someone genuinely wanted to create it.

Maybe I'm in the wrong here, or maybe the issue can't be helped. But I'm just so tired of feeling like I can't trust this company to create for creativity's sake anymore.