"Golly, Kalista looks like an interesting character. I think I'll read her lore."

I see you fail to realize that LoL is a game subject to change. It's neither a cake or a cheeseburger, being constantly changed is in its core.

There is a difference between changing a number of background numbers to justify balance and changing an entire section of the game's structure (in this case, its narrative).

You are also conveniently ignoring all my other points that counter yours, mainly that you are not paying for LoL nor the rights to affect its creation or that we are talking lore here, which is a completely negligible part of the game (and no-one stopping you from reading old lore, really). You have 0 legal basis for complaining about Riot's creative decisions.

I did want to edit in something for that. The fact is, while I'm not paying for LoL or rights to affect its creation, the matter of fact is that I'm still a paying customer and when a game goes and alters a major aspect of what attracted me to it in the first place, it shouldn't surprise anyone when I become critical of that decision.

The matter of fact is that Riot do want to make their lore more marketable and worth paying money for, but the critical issue is that their approach so far has been better at alienating their audience than improving customer loyalty. At this point, none of the people I know would pay for any lore-related products because they either find the new direction boring and unoriginal, or are put off by the narrative team's behavior on the forums.

I didn't play Mass Effect so I'm not familiar with the whole fiasco.

Mass Effect 3 had a ending that was completely disconnected from the rest of the game and choices made during it, despite the game being actively advertised as being affected by your choices. When the company was approached regarding it, the leads' response was claiming that the narrative was their creative vision and that players were spoiled and entitled if they wanted it adjusted to fit their expectations.

The company was promptly sued, both of the founders resigned from their positions and retired from the industry. and the ending was modified to reflect the criticisms.

Let me get this straight, if your game is not profitable anymore, you are forced to waste resources to keep it alive forever? Seriously?

No, but you are legally obligated to release the game's netcode and allow people to run their own identification servers, thus ensuring that the game can continue to live without your support. You are legally forbidden from simply killing it the way EA did with Darkspore and are doing with Dawngate, however.

All right, so I guess your argument is that companies should be encouraged to be amoral, treat their customers poorly and insult them whenever some criticizes their decisions, and that people are expected to pay money regardless of the company's behavior.

I sincerely hope you're not running a business.

No, you are encouraging a lack of ethics in a company. And you're contradicting yourself in places to boot.

Why do you think they stopped with their crappy female design?

Updating the splash arts?

All of the recent splash arts are hyper-sexualized, have broken anatomy with waspish waists, disconnected body parts, boobs-and-ass poses and randomly applied boob plates. An entire blog popped up to talk about how crummy their treatment of female characters is. People started drawing joke fanart because of it.

These two sentences run contrary to each other.

Why do you think they changed the game to be more creative?

Define more creative. The Shurima event was notoriously badly written, its narrative logic constantly kept sabotaging itself and Xerath's lore was ganked from a famous manga. Kalista has literally one personality trait and cannot actually participate in the narrative because doing so would require murdering an important character. Gnar doesn't talk. Rek'sai is a rip-off of Tremors.

Creative isn't anywhere near there.

And where exactly did they insult their customers for criticizing them?

Dismissing people's arguments as "mere disagreements" and saying he doesn't even want to acknowledge any community-created content pertaining to old lore is insulting.

Furthermore,

You being a paying customer is, frankly, irrelevant. The company owes you nothing just because you gave them money for a certain service. You liked a skin or a rune page, you paid for it. You did not give them charity or do them any favor. If you don't like the changes, you are free to leave. I personally think these changes are for the better.

"So long as a company is doing things I prefer, all other people in the community are irrelevant. I'll encourage the company to drive any customers who disagree with me away, and will in fact tell those customers that their money and loyalty to the company is worth nothing."

That is basically what you're saying. Having the gall to call people entitled after that paragraph is pretty shameful.

When a game changes something and you dislike it, you're well within your rights to criticize it, no-one blames you for that. What you are not allowed to do however, is cry that it's a "breach of consumer protection laws" when a game is taking a direction that you personally don't like, as if the company should be forced to change its creation based on your tastes. Lore is just a bit of an added flavor to a champion. It's dubious how sellable it is. JoJ for instance, was discontinued precisely because not enough people were interested and it wasn't paying off. What Riot is currently doing with their cinematics is far more effective in attracting players.

Have you actually seen discussion of the recent cinematics? Because most out-of-League discussion deems Shurima videos as "so bad they're hilarious", criticized Warriors as "self-indulgent" and dismissed Rek'sai as a rip-off of DOTA2's Weaver. The new direction does a lot of things, but attracting people isn't one of them.

I'd hardly call getting rid of summoners "changing the game's structure". Lore is completely irrelevant to your game-playing experience. Changing some numbers hugely influences gameplay. And most importantly, you can still re-read the old lore. You cannot play the old LoL. What you really want is Riot to continue releasing lore based on the old one, which is like insisting that DC had no right to reboot some superhero property of theirs (again).

Yeah, it was such an irrelevant part that champions referred to players as summoners and the entire Riot continues to do so. Lore is so irrelevant that Riot implemented in-game miniquests such as "The Hunt is On" for Kha'Zix and Rengar, or the ones for Freljord champions in the Howling Abyss. Yeah, lore doesn't ever affect gameplay in any way. Oh, and the fact their new objects have been tied to lore references, names and locations is definitely merely incidental, it's not like lore has anything to do with the game at all. Why should it have to, after all? Since when did videogames have a story? Or, alternatively, what decade is this, the 90s? We're all in for the serious biz, multiplayer, eSports, deep shit, man, not some puny lore involving some characters whose quotes we just hear myriads of time, getting attached to them... *rolls his eyes*

And if you seriously think LoL is an example of good storytelling, I don't know what to tell you. Go read some good literature that doesn't involve shoving every archetype or cliche into it as a character.

I won't address the phrases before this, because these last ones are particularly rude, offensive and demeaning towards me, as they imply me being kind of uneducated. I've read good literature in my life, you may rest assured, both classic and modern. I've studied extensively a great deal of European literature, for instance, in particular of course the one of my country for obvious reasons. I have read some "classics" which the majority of people know about just from movies vaguely derived from them. I have studied Latin literature in its original form, taking great pleasures from the likes of Cicero and Titus Lucretius Carus. But I have dabbled in Poe's stories too and Lovecraft and other modern literature like sci-fi renown masterpieces such as the Foundation series of Isaac Asimov. I, of course, being a man of the '90s, have engaged in some popular contemporary series of these past two decades as well. And of all of these things, I didn't simply think what I was told to think, I elaborated on them my own critiques and came up with my personal opinion. I was taught how to carry a literary analysis and was pretty damn good at it, so don't assume that since I liked some aspects of the old LoL's lore I do not have any education in the subject, because I do have one and you can't dismiss my observations just as those of some kid not knowing what the (literary) world is. My memory may be rusting since I've chosen university studies in physics, but I hold myself rightly as able to discuss literature and recognize bad and good narrative when I read some.

Sincerely yours, Summoner Diahane.

Quinn's splash is hypersexualized? Lissandra's? Kalista's? Kalista's skin? Rek'Sai's? Fact is, all their recent female champions have dignity and character, unlike their previous embarrassments. You must be blind if you haven't noticed this change and it sure as hell didn't happen because Riot suddenly had a revelation. The Sejuani rework is this change in a single before-after example.

Yes, they released three decently dressed champions and one who is essentially just a cockroach with a female pronoun.

On the other hand, they released Forecast Janna who reimagines the character as a dumb blond in a miniskirt, put out Arcade Miss Fortune which builds on the incredibly gross and sexist "gamer grrl" stereotype, and they released a bunch of updated splash art that completely objectifies the characters. Ashe, Miss Fortune, Vayne, Caitlyn all have splash arts that are anatomically impossible and prioritize showing off their "assets" rather than combat skills.

League's current art direction is being very actively discussed as embarrassingly sexist, you'd know that if you simply searched "league of legends" and "sexism", or if you read comments in news websites' articles.

In-game creative. More decision-making in the jungle, more adaptive build paths, less win-at-champ-select-ness. Just as with splashes and textures (which they change when people complain about them), team builder, jungle timers, minimap death indicators, teamfight gui etc. etc. They listen to what the community wants and you ignoring all these examples doesn't make it less true.

Last I checked, we weren't discussing gameplay here. I could go into detail why I think the new changes are meh, but this isn't the forum for it.

LoL as a story? Creative? Please. It was always centered on copying popular tropes. It was always low-brow entertainment. Or are you telling me a game with a werewolf, a troll, a Spartan, a pirate stripper, a mummy, a viking and a ninja hamster is the perfect one for deep storytelling?

Any game can be perfect for deep storytelling. My current projects include a brawler, a retro platformer, a turn-based strategy and a visual novel. None of them require less narrative effort than the other. In fact, when I pitched to an idea of a time management/date-sim where the player is a "radio support" in a organization similar to the Institute of War, I had several people lining up to code the thing for me.

Yes, dismissing people's arguments is completely acceptable when they're not even willing to talk about your current work or if they downright humiliate and insult you. And not wanting to acknowledge fanworks is completely acceptable. Like are you kidding me? This is freakin' normal for artists, in some places employers are even forbidden to look at fanworks to avoid copyright issues. They even clearly stated (at least on the old forums) that when you post your ideas you shouldn't expect Riot to make them into reality because they aren't your personal art service.

People did talk about the current work. Have you somehow missed the part where the reason people are no longer interested in following the narrative team's efforts is because every single piece of criticism is dismissed as a "creative disagreement", even in cases where people are calling out actual faults such as poor sentence structure and lack of narrative logic?

And no, I don't like a lot of things Riot's doing. I hate the new mobility creep. I hate some of their champions. I think the lore (both now and before) is bad and undeveloped. And I genuinely can't see how their writers can't write an engaging story and do it at a pace faster than a glacier. I hate a lot of their recent skins. But the fact remains, it's their work. And as an artist, it disgusts me that people will treat your work as their personal idea dump just because you managed to make it successful and they couldn't. It's Riot's world, you're just living in it. Snap out of your little creator fantasy and go write your own crap, or let these people do their job. If the current workers are bad, Rito will hire new ones like they did with their splash arts. They should under no circumstances give a ton of anons the reign to do what they want with their story, that's the worst thing you can do.

Oh boy, the old "if you think you're so good, go write your own stuff" argument! Because none of us heard it or anything.

Here is the thing - I do write plenty of my own content and I put a lot of work into ensuring that none of it is "crap". And as a creator, I have reached the point of maturity where I'm comfortable with having my work criticized just as I am comfortable with criticizing the work of others. And when people to whom I provide criticism react in a juvenile and dismissive manner, then my opinion on their ethics as creators and businessmen will drop.

And the fact is, far as everyone knows, this isn't their work. This is the work of other writers who left Riot by now, and saying that they dislike when people talk about the work of their predecessors is embarrassing and smacks of jealousy.

The only thing you've beaten here is your e-peen, mostly on hard and cold surfaces of this forum. I suggest doing that less, the size isn't as impressive as you think and the technique is lacking.

Wait, we can't complain about one of Riot's teams because another completely separate team does something better than they do?

It would be one thing if they had explained and addressed concerns with more than "It's restricting" and "We don't want to address it."

It feels for a lot of people that a new Lore Team was hired and now wants to bulldoze everything they used to like about the lore without any cares for what the fanbase wants.

People just want to be able to give input before what could very well be radical, nonsensical rewrites of champions. They want to do damage control. They don't necessarily want to write the story, they just want a voice in how it's written before it's written. We all know how Riot can be with reverting changes. If it's out, it's probably sticking around. There's little one can do for feedback when it's out.

We don't want to go "this rewrite is bad because x, y, z" only to have them go "we'll keep this in mind next time."

After JoJ was discontinued several years ago, lore focused almost exclusively on champions with "We're working on it" excuses making up the majority of non-champion lore work. I'd hardly call it a 5-years worth magnum opus, as far as I know the whole IoW plot died with JoJ, it just took them years to kill it officially.

Which was there choice to ruin something great, something people loved. It was working for them and they just toss it away for no good reason. Who the hell does something like that? You have to be stupid to try to fix something that is not broken. The worst part is the fact that despite the massive amount of flack they received they didn't give a damn about we thought and just ignored us and quite frankly they still don't care. They just toss out statements and think we agree with them.

Possibly because you aren't actually beating anything, you are merely being an abrasive pissant and playing up a pile of pompousness and ad hominem. Nothing you just posted actually carries logic, it is merely a pile of accusations and attempts to humiliate me.

The issue here has nothing to do with discouraging or not caring about fanfic, and you know it. It has everything to do with abrasively treating your community as unimportant so long as it doesn't generate constant praise for your work.

Nice job at assuming I write fanfic and vomiting insults at me over that, by the way.