I have some things I feel like could happen -
Mostly, it feels sometimes like the lore is made up as you come to it. It doesn't feel like there's a grander vision or goal here, and when writing a story, you need that goal. The lore has to be treated somewhat like a giant novel - all the pieces have to work cohesively to create a story.
For instance, one of my hot button points this year was how the Darkin were treated. I adored the idea of them being some foreign invading species, because it explained a lot about things while simultaneously leaving them a bit mysterious. Them being such an unknown species explained why the residents of Runeterra couldn't defeat them and why they had to resort to trapping them - and then their unknown nature led to another surprise the people didn't expect - the Darkin could possess people if they came in contact with them after they were entrapped. So just not knowing what they were allowed for them to break reality as the people of the world know it, and created some great story telling elements that didn't have to rely on the established understanding of the world. It also explained their new and "forbidden" magic, the blood magic, as clearly this magic was something that the people of the world hadn't experienced before and it's understandable that it'd be taught to them by outsiders. It also made infinitely more sense WHY the Darkin would be royally pissed and alone when they were trapped and shut off from their home world forever, and it also was interesting in that them being outside invaders gave the world more enemies to deal with who weren't Void related, yet still a massive threat.
That whole story, and the untold stories that could have been built around it, got retconned away less than a year later, and replaced with something that I felt was far more inferior and trite, and committed a pretty bad narrative fallacy of looping everything in on itself and tying up neat little bows by over explaining things, and also making everyone "once upon a human being." Making the Darkin fallen ascended, while also trying to explain why they operated in the way they do as being former humans, and explaining their blood magic just felt contrived and forced, like they had all these concepts they had to make work within the new scope.
Then there's the more recent Lissandra bio with Nunu's release. It was a HOT HOT mess, and confusing as hell, and it left huge, key elements of her personality out of her own bio. It was not nearly as understandable or concise as her former bio and also erased her motives and plans, which pretty much defined her as a character. This felt incredibly rushed, and while I understand there is more lore coming, the fact that the lore we got was chaotic and incomplete, when it's supposed to be a concise bio of a character, is inexcusable. Bios shouldn't be half completed synopses. They're supposed to be bite size explanations of characters to give us a quick idea of them, not deliberately left with gaping plot holes so you can fill them later with something sensational. You can do that kind of thing with stories and lore events in game, but not with character bios.
And then there's Karma. Her original bio update around Irelia's era was a disaster. It wasn't Karma. I'm not going to pretend to know why the decision was made to rewrite her entirely like that when it didn't coincide AT ALL with the character. It got updated with Akali, and came more in line with who she was originally, but in my eyes, the Irelia-era lore update shouldn't have happened at all. In this scenario, and similarly the Lissandra bio update, it really feels like the lore team doesn't know the characters they're writing for. It feels like they've never played them, they've never read their old bios and lore information, it feels like they don't know how they interact with other characters in the game. This is a problem when you're trying to refine an existing character to fit in the new world. It's entirely possible to update these characters to fit without dramatically overhauling with something insane and sensational - and to an extent, I feel like this is probably the meat of the issue. There's a lot of sensationalizing going on to make characters FLASH and PIZAZZ when updating their bios - but oftentimes, simplest is best. Not all updates need be reinvented with insane new elements - did Karma really need to be the gestalt spirit soup of Ionian Nirvana? The answer is no, she didn't, that element that was added to her didn't add much of anything to her character and originally detracted so hard from her character that it turned her into someone else. If they had merely folded Karma as we have known her for years into the new lore, that would have been that. Everyone would have been content, because we still get to have the Karma we love.
This can be equated to bringing a book to the silver screen. Let's use Harry Potter as an example. We loved the books and the characters therein, so when they came to the movies, we were stoked. But rather than reinvent Harry to now be something like the mystical godchild borne to the most powerful witch in existence and the most powerful wizard in the world in efforts to make him more of the "chosen one," Rowling stuck to her story - his parents are plain people who simply loved him. She adapted this story effortlessly to the movie screen, and because of her faithful adaptation of her books to equally good movies, they were a resounding success. League champions DESPERATELY NEED to be treated in the same way when their lore is being adapted to the new world. They need to be who they always are, just expanded. We don't need to reinvent them entirely all the time and/or add dramatic elements to their story (don't get me started on the way they murdered Zac's parents in his lore update), we just need to have the characters we love built to be functional in the grander scope of the world.
On a similar vein, there's Pyke and Nautilus. I cannot recall if it was Scathelocke or Waargabobo who said this around Pyke's release, but they had hardcore planned to rewrite Nautilus entirely. This was so they could cannibalize his story for Pyke. This is a SEVERE NO-NO, and again reinforces the point that there doesn't seem to be a grander vision in mind for the lore, that it's all made up at will. Under no circumstance should you ever even bat an eyelash in consideration of erasing one champion's lore and story so that you can make a new champion who tells that story better. Make it work, however you can with the two coinciding - you did this with Pyke once you saw how against Nautilus' lore replacement the community was, but at the expense of losing potentially cool VOs for Pyke. Because Nautilus was in a lore limbo he shouldn't have been in to start with, there were no lines in Pyke's VO towards him, since you were unsure of where Nautilus was going. This is bad, considering how interesting their interactions could have been. Instead, we get chatter with people like Ashe? So no, please do not consider this kind of thing again for the future. Rewriting existing characters should ever and always be a hard, decisive NO.
And then we come to my last major problem with the lore, that I only briefly touched on above - it's the over-interconnectivity of everything. It's fine having the Watchers be Void related, we'd suspected as much since Lissandra's release. However, it's becoming a HUGE problem in the lore lately how every villainous force in the world is now being tied to the Void, and it's equally becoming a problem how all the god beings of the world are the bastard children of the Targonian Aspects. This is homogenizing the world, and it's creating a dullness. When you know everything in a story, there are no surprises. When there are no unknown elements to this new character, what's the point of investing interest in them? Once this starts to lock in the story, the story starts to fall apart, because the compelling elements are all gone. There's no mysticism, no unknowns, no newness to everything - and this is further expanded by the fact that pretty much all the higher beings are now former humans, again, making things dull. This over-explanation of the world is detrimental to story telling, and it's a bad habit that the team appears to be falling into.
There's a caveat, of course. I give exception to VGUs, as these are special cases of reinventing the champion and their kits. My main drive about this post is expressly regarding already existing champions who haven't had VGUs.
