This thread is about data collection for Riot Games!
I just wanted to get some data on whether players thought that champion lore improved as a result of the retcon, or if it got worse.
Riot. here's some raw data from your players, please consider it going forward with future decisions.
Players, vote honestly, and let Riot know what you think about its new lore direction. Good, or bad.
The presentation of lore has definitely improved. Back in the day, we only got blocks of text. Now we have pictures and trailers and stuff, it's all flashy and colorful and fun... that is, until someone tries to put any actual narrative content into it, such as the case with Rise of the Ascended.
The thing is, while the presentation definitely improved, the actual content of the lore has gone completely downhill. Rise of the Ascended was terribly written, with bored dialogue being sloppily edited onto the imagery. Cassiopeia's lore makes no sense, Xerath's short story got plagiarized from a manga and Kalista's "lore" makes her essentially a non-character whose entire interesting point is her involvement in that one ancient event that the devs won't tell us about. The writing is so laughably bad that the prologue to Miss Fortune's League judgment, which was basically a flowery description of her bouncing breasts, had more character than Azir's two trailers, short story and piles of dialogue.
The old League also benefited from having a sense of humor; it knew that it was derivative as hell and laughed at itself, sneaking in memes and references where it could. The current League's attempts at being funny are essentially a 50-year old super-conservative Maths teacher trying to figure out what modern teenagers like. OH BOY, DJ SONA DOES KARAMELDANSEN! IT'S NOT LIKE THAT THING WENT OUT OF FASHION SIX YEARS AGO OR ANYTHING.
New character concepts are also basically attempts to hit up all the marketable stereotypes on the checklist. Sion worked out because he had no personality in the first place, but Trundle went from an anti-hero to Garrosh Hellscream; Vladimir went from a charming but emotionally tormented serial killer to a generic cackling villain. Azir is just an overbearing Egyptian emperor. Kalista and Amumu are just horror movie tropes.
The old League cared less about making characters marketable and more about making them interesting, and it showed.
tl;dr The presentation of lore content went up in quality by miles, but the actual content is sloppily written, stereotypical garbage. It's a change made to raise short-term profits by luring people in by the shiny, but it's going to bite them in the arse in the long term.
Hell, it's already biting them. I've seen gaming websites report on the New Year and especially Chinese New Year events in DOTA2 due to their heavy lore content on top of various goodies attached, but nobody is talking about LoL because all the recent events are basically "buy more skins and summoner icons pls".
the problem is that the "new lore" could easily be the "old", as there was nothing stopping them from making the current lore before the retcon. They have yet to come up with any lore which cannot exist alongside the IoW.
To be honest, I'm not sure I know what the new lore is besides the whole Shurima incident and it was.. well, eeh.
It was okay I guess.
I don't even know what direction they're going in because they haven't revealed anything that's significant that wasn't involved with a champion release.
We'd need lore to compare with first.
I wish they'd buckle on it, go back to the great, innovative, gameplay/story intergation rich stuff they had going, and which people in general were plenty happy with.
I wish they'd make Factions a game mode, and start making more League judgements.
I wish they'd realise that a non-additive retcon is not worth anything, that reboots only work in static mediums, and that gameplay/story integration is what we need more of, not less.
The old lore doesn't have a quality problem, it has a problem of being hard to sift through. The solution to that is to present more of it better, not decide to have less.
Really though, the new lore direction isn't better than the old one because honestly, I haven't seen a direction. I've seen a lack of new stuff actually needing the retcon at all, but I haven't seen any of it as being in conflict with the old lore, they could withdraw the retcon silently by releasing some new material referencing summoners or the institute of the league, and while we'd all rejoice and praise them for it (having the guts to withdraw stupid decisions does deserve praise after all, as does admitting mistakes), most people wouldn't take notice. The people who don't follow the lore wouldn't notice, the people who don't play league won't notice, people who start playing later won't notice.
Nobody would notice it if they canceled the retcon, because nothing's actually been retconned yet. I don't count shortening descriptions as retconning.
The champions who were changed is another issue of course, and a point where they have to start asking themselves how much change a champion can go through before they're betraying the fans of that character. Or betraying their trust at least. It's risky to play with that kind of trust, because why should I invest my time and excitement into something they can take away from me at any time when I can go play a non-dynamic game and be secure in my knowledge that even if the sequel sucks and ruins the characters I've invested myself in, I can ignore that and keep to the parts which only contains the version I enjoyed and invested my enjoyment in.
Can't really ignore meeting new canon trundle in every third co-op vs Ai dominion match now can I? A steady reminder that if Riot decides to, there's nothing I can do to stop them from taking out my favourite champions and replacing them with something else.
I'm just glad it hasn't happened yet. Just like how until they release some actually contradictory material, the great retcon hasn't happened yet.
I just wish they would go back to the Old Lore of Summoners and the Institute.
I mean I can understand why it would be hard to like, right lore to that, but it also allows for player input on lore.
Like the fact that a while a go there were 3 clans about to start a giant war up north and now nothing. Same with the Dominion Map and Noxus/Demacia. I mean would it really be so hard to set up a different que and have it only contain Demacia/Piltover and Noxus/Zaun champions on the Dominion map then have like a month of Noxus vs Demacia player battles and then whoever has the highest win ratio gets to "mine" the Kalimnda area? And then Skarner's people could be discovered and we have a bunch of bug people trying to find new home and then have the IOW people go with them and find a new race and bam new map and new people etc etc. I mean what they had before could have been limitless in Lore and games and player input. But now it's just like 120 some people killing each other a few thousand times a day then doing it all over again the next day. What's the point?
The presentation of new stuff is good, but I'd rather have a wall of text the size of the entire Harry Potter series than every new champion have a pretty video and a new retcon.
Overall I'd say Lore improved,locations and characters are better defined than before(I mean its because of the old lore not defining stuff that good,that rioters need to discuss certain characters on the boards just to figure out what these characters are)
However the real problem is that lore releases slowed down and that is a huge problemr,because that is preventing story arcs and so on,however that hasn't much to do with the retcon itself,because while there are champs who now need a new lore because of it,they would have most likely gone the same route even without the retcon.
I think the raw quality went up. However, for some reason, certain characters are getting changed. These are two different things though. The first is great, the second is awful.
Lore was poorly developed in the past, compared to the high quality of things that have been released, such as Sion and Shurima ect. The problem isn't that. The problem with the new lore is, the old lore's world was substantially more developed, and now we're only receiving this new amazing lore once every three months. So, it'll be about 7 years before we even remotely establish the world, and by that time, it'll be ready for a new retcon. If you're going to entirely rebuild the League of Legends world, you need to have a huge update to explain everything that's changed. We need to know why there's no IoW, we need to know if Summoners even exist anymore (You only need to click once, fool.) There's so many loose ends that need to be tied up, and Riot clearly doesn't intend to speed up giving us this lore.
I think the game being free but being the most popular in the world means that every cent goes to ensuring this game manages to just stay running with the 'quality' they have. I won't get into balance, but I think we can clearly say champion designs, world designs and such have been pretty cool lately. The problem is, there's nothing left to establish this new world, because there is no budget to pay the people to develop the world. Hell, I'd volunteer to help write things for League free of charge, but obviously full time writers need to be compensate unlike part-timers like myself.
Tl;DR: Old lore was weaker but consistent, new lore is bright and flashy for five minutes, then gives us nothing for months even though the entire world is an enigma now.
"Urgot has a dark, secret past."
Honestly, Riot has taken a break from trying to present a story mode to inter-champion relationships, and are building up the world of Runeterra. I think it's safe to say that the rebuilding of the world is their way restarting the story-- an introduction, beginning with the setting. Freljord, Shurima, and the Shadow Isles have all been getting some love in the past few months. From this, it looks like they're retelling old stories and adding new lore content with city-state "expansions". After most initial locations have received these expansions (the city-states + void, Kumungu, Underwater, Angel World, etc.) character stories might develop, or a return to the city-states with a lore update could occur (post-ascension Shurima,,, what are Azir's plans for the Resurrection of Shurima? Where are Renekton and Xerath now? What's going to happen between Sivir and Cassiopeia?
They're restarting from the beginning, and I think they'll be doing a good job straightening out older content. with IOW gone, Kalamadas and the Iono-Noxian War might be as well, so need patience.
The old lore was interesting, but there were so many loopholes, and very little possibilities in continuing the storyline for many of the major characters. The new lore so far has been an introduction to the world, and it may be a few years before we see new lore. If you have the patience, it will be interesting to see what they bring to the table.
(Also, don't whine about filler champions like Gnar, Rek'Sai, and Braum. They do need to add new champions to keep the game fresh.)
