full honesty on varus lore, and a heart felt critique on Riot's approach to change lately

the old lore was fully established and worked fine within the universe, the new lore is very well fleshed out, but disservices the community by actively changing core variables.

I think that the production value, writing, and story telling of the new lore are superior, I think you guys did a great job in those respects honestly and your hard work shows.

but that doesn't change the fact that you altered the core fabric of a character in your established world without serious consideration for the community's input.

If riot had put out survey's, context lore, even lore reviews, Then the community would likely be happier, I wouldn't even doubt that the final result would be extrodinarily similar

the truth of the matter being that people take a lot of personal stake into this game, while you create it and definitively have the right to make the final call. We are your client base, we put a lot of time into our mains, we have an understanding of the game and its lore.

Also that final thing about in a world where magic and dragons noone is gonna bat an eye at two dudes kissing? That's not true and it rips out the humanity of the game world.

Riot has dehumanized much of the game, giving vayne less hardlined prejudice, viktor being brought from being total evil only to have further context of him being actually pretty fucking evil but with a cause.

yasuo and riven having predictable outcome? Seriously? The lead up to it being riven who killed his master was too forwards, it lent itself to being a misdirect, even a kinship story of two outcasts.

you've ripped out mystery from the game in the case of shaco, which implied almost perfect malevolence. It seemed like a better character to have him masked and up for answers, It gave shaco a mysterious lead into any story. Now for him to fight another champ it has to be essentially a crossing of paths and random circumstance, If he were an assassin, with potentially demonic power. He would have more story potential, he would be able to wind up in the same room as j4, swain, azir, camille, heimerdinger, gangplank, graves, miss fortune, or basically any other character in some sort of leadership or nobility position. Hell you could even have his mask tear in a story and show some sort of stuffing but never comment on it again.

Very few people care about homosexuality in any respect. Frankly noone would be remissed if you retconned the lore of a champion that has been speculated to be homosexual in the past, or had no romantic direction either way, Varus had a wife and kids. He had a motivation that made sense compared to the new story of salt the earth.

The current varus has his lover, he doesn't have that outside motivator, the vengeance is the outside monster now, it is no longer the human element of him.

There's no indication of any part of the two humans within the varus kit, if this lore accompanied a rework that incorporated Val and Kai's swordsmanship, hunting capacity, or love then that would be fine.

as a comparison, Aatrox is a Darkin who has complete control over his form, arguably there is little to no actual influence by the host on his actions or fighting style.

Kayn is clearly in the midst of the battle, and his darkin form feels like a hybrid

Varus is in a fragile 3 man harmony between a psychic demon bow, an archer hunter, and a swordsman/rougey type hunter, two of his elements are archers so skipping the swordplay is excusable.. But where are the elements of a hunter of beasts? where do the expertise of the other two thirds come into play?

The lore doesn't fit the kit or presentation of the character. He now requires a VGU to actually fit in with the lore, when before he needed nothing more than an explicit usage of the word "Darkin" in place of the word "Corruption" in some place in his story, and maybe an epilogue which set him on a course towards noxus.. maybe even a cliffhanger of sorts involving his family, or a mission to purge the darkin from his body even through self destruction.

otherwise What is the motivation for the eternal torture of the two hosts? and why did the darkin need both val and kai again? he's an all powerful demigod like entity at this point, darkin are at least on the level of shuriman ascended or targonian aspects., he should easily be able to overwhelm the mind of one of the mortals enough to sculp a body from him.

I don't see why he even separates them, darkin are masters of manipulation, why wouldn't he just like... let them have those nice combined cute field cuddle moments while he used their flesh to bring death to the world?

oh yeah, because he's evil for the sake of evil.

that's the thing, Varus had an identity, a motivation, and flaws. He was in a pretty strong place. Strong enough that if you actually decided to make an open world game you could have a lot of fun around the character.

there is no mystery specifically attributed to him anymore. His darkin has a 2d motivation with no clout over it.

Aatrox at least appears to be helping mankind on a level, even if it is to selfish ends he seems to pick and choose. "As if he's preparing the world for some great battle yet to come"

Rhaast is currently wrestling a trained martial artist of sorts, someone who actually uses mental training via shadow assassin style.

Varus is mad and gonna kill all the people for reasons

it seems that these beings live off the energy of war and death, in a way somewhat similar to how Ahri and Evelyn live off of emotions and memory. They seem to have a stake in man/yordlekind that leads me to believe that killing us all is actually detrimental to them

By the old lore, it was assumed that they were basically farmers and we were cattle, in a time of calamity i would assume to see the darkin at the side of the aspects simply for preservation of their stock.

now it seems like they're just evil for the hell of it, how is this character growth?

Now I said before the actual storytelling was better, they did a better job with weaving something together, and if it were a new champion this would be some of the best lore, but the fact is it actively downgraded a champion's concept for what?

Well funny enough you guys were in rolling stone magazine talking about how forward thinking you were and how much you needed an lgbt character. Is this pandering for tax cuts or something? Can you just be honest with us?

The gaming community needs an honest and in touch company, we've lost most of them.

gone are the days of "Hey we need to put out this subscription to get us enough funding to keep these servers up and put out content"

now is the day of "Get as many customers as possible and forget about the actual quality of the product"

We're playing a game that used to be somewhat of a masterpiece and a company's perfection of a formula that was birthed by westwood studios years ago and cultured into DotA, but now this game is another cocacola, massed produced and missing some level of connectivity.

This course will lead to a bubble, you'll get a short term boost in sales, and then you'll lose those consumers after you change your plan. You'll go the way of either Sega, westwood, or capcom instead of the way of nintendo.

please just make your game, you don't need political statements in it

and please PLEASE PLEASE have active community acknowledgement, to make people feel like they have enough of a say. Just give us a rough draft and say "Did you like this" and the votes will work themselves out

put more emphasis on people who play the champ more frequently too! I would rather the varus mains having more of a voice on varus than the teemo mains, each champion offers a flavor of fiction, and those flavors naturally attract people who are into that type of fiction. Therefor in theory those people would have a better opinion on how to affect that fiction than a generalist writing crew.

again i want to actually say that I acknowledge and appreciate the hard work by your writing, illustrative, animation, video, and music production teams. They clearly do put a lot of hard work and effort into what they make, and I can tell they're passionate. I also know a thing or two about production and how hard it can really be to get the idea into a palatable format.

I think the music was great for the story portrayed, and I think the portrayed story was actually good, I just don't think the final decisions were made in a way that left a good taste in the mouth of many of us.

I frankly don't even care about varus, I'm like m5 or 6 on him, i spend most of my time playing jayce, But honestly the idea that you might do this to my main, or one of the champions that intimately interact with my main without giving me even a slight voice is kind of off-putting and makes me feel like this company is losing sight of the fans.

Gay characters? Yeah fine, do a million, i don't care. I still think making it be a taboo in the game world would be better from a story telling perspective. but hey there's almost no prejudice towards yordles and they're pretty insanely different

I've seen so many great things in the story taken out, from the simplistic story of garen removing both the question of how he would react if he saw lux's magic, to his romeo+juliet thing with katarina (Low hanging fruit i know)