Lore and Community Engagement

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I'd like to continue the discussion from this thread, which had only started when two factors pushed it out of sight:

• It probably received a large share of "disagree downvotes" aimed at the Rioter who posted the thread, which dropped it off the front page.
• it was drowned out by flurry of other Red posts burying it in the Tracker.

There were so many good posts in this thread, and I can't re-post them all, but I invite their original authors to do so in the comments.

To start with, here's my exchange with Tamat and Jaredan, during which I think the thread transitioned from a "redirect removal" thread to a more involved discussion about lore and community engagement:

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Tamat
Our biggest motivator to transition to the boards wasn't to silence anyone, it was to make a lot more noise! I want to see the the folks at Riot that work on the story to have a much more active presence here. My biggest piece of feedback for everyone here is that you need to make them feel more welcome, and less like they have to walk into a lions den to talk with you.

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CupcakeTrap

My biggest piece of feedback for everyone here is that you need to make them feel more welcome, and less like they have to walk into a lions den to talk with you.

While the rage got shockingly out of hand at one point, and nothing can excuse that incident, most of the standard vitriol is (I think) the result of us not feeling that we have any kind of engagement.

The Riot Norm: Community Engagement As Part Of Design Part of the reason we like Riot so much is that you guys really do engage with the community and talk things out. Sure, you do larger-scale playtesting, and you conduct market research, but I at least get the impression that in most areas you'll also consider feedback from the forum/Boards/Reddit "focus group".

Not So With Lore Lore is the big exception. For literally years, the lore community teemed with ideas. (And not just Urgot/Kassadin fanfic.) Riot would come by and mumble something about how you were "working on something awesome", then vanish. This didn't create excitement: it created fear. That might sound like an excessively strong word: fear, really, about a pretendy story for a video game? But I think it's a suitable word.

** Why Lore Is Personal** People get anxious about their favorite Champions getting nerfed or reworked. People care about their Elo, and their gameplay experiences. I think it's even more acute with lore. This is not just a League phenomenon: look at any community that's gathered around a work of fiction or a universe. The process of experiencing fiction, especially immersive, universe-building fiction, is an affectionate process of familiarization. It taps into our basic social instincts: we get to know characters, we get involved in their stories.

Retcons and reworks are upsetting for this reason, especially if they come out of the blue. For a quirky analogy, consider the fact that one can't really tickle oneself. In a similar way, to the degree that the changing force is alien and "other", the disturbance is perceived as greater, especially when accompanied by a feeling of loss of control.

Why Deleting Summoners And The League Is Extra-Personal Deleting Summoners, and the League, is more jarring still by orders of magnitude, because it strikes right to the heart of immersion. It felt like you were kicking us out of Runeterra — because you were. There are creative and theoretical reasons why people oppose this change, but there's also this very personal element.

Contrast: Community Engagement During Gameplay Changes Versus Lore Changes When the gameplay team sets out to do a gameplay rework of a Champion, there's a big discussion, with top-level decisionmakers actively participating and responding flexibly to feedback, engaging and debating with the community. I think this really sets League apart.

Then Riot went and made massive changes to lore after years of secretive behind-the-scenes plotting, with absolutely no community engagement beyond "gosh, this'll be cool!", worrisome trends (the gradual erasure of Summoner references in voicework), and confusing micro-reveals.

I'm searching for a suitable gameplay analogy. A Champion kit rework is really a poor match: it's too small, by far. Imagine if Riot just decided, I don't know, to rework all melee Champions into pure tanks. There would be a discussion about this. It might all be smoke and mirrors, but if so they're well-deployed, because I really do think based on past experience that this would be a back-and-forth, with community input influencing (perhaps even cancelling) the proposed change.

Here, there was no discussion about what we liked about LoL's lore. Riot says there are tradeoffs between the immersion provided by the League framework and the "freedom" (debatable, but that's a separate topic) found in a League-free setting. Those tradeoffs were not discussed here. Neither the hardcore lore community nor the community in general had input.

Does this help explain the reaction?

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Jaredan
Hello all, and you in particular, of course, CupcakeTrap. First up, apologies for my own lack of appearance here on the new shiny Story and Art forum; it's been rather hectic. Still, that's no excuse, and making time to engage with you is always a priority.

Not So With Lore I don't think you are being hyperbolic when you use the word "fear." Fear is a response due to being unsure about something you care profoundly about, and that has arisen because we've done a poor job in communication for some time, for a variety of reasons, and because you hold our Champions and our world dear. We want our communication to improve, and we want your love for Runeterra to continue and grow by leveling up the stories we tell and how we tell them.

Essentially, as we were working on how we were moving forward with the story of Runeterra, it made certain interactions that would be meaningful difficult. I know when I arrived at Riot I would pop on the boards and see where I could play a game of "bat the idea around" with players. As soon as discussion moved towards "...and how did <insert character name here> join the League?" there was an overwhelming urge to throw down a Ninja smoke bomb, shout "Look, over there! It's Elvis!" and run away. We couldn't engage with you fully because we hadn't worked through our direction to the point that we could answer those particular questions. Personally, I didn't want to start conversations that would end in avoiding the questions.

The Dev Blog that announced the changes was not only to give you a better idea of where we were headed, but to allow us to start speaking about it in a way that wasn't infused with fear. That word again. I was unsure of something I care profoundly about—making the experience of players better, particularly through story. Hence the hesitance.

Why Lore is Personal I couldn't agree more—it's why I work in the field that I do. Story isn't just something we consume, it's a fundamental part of how we live, and it informs who we are. The stories that matter to us stay with us.

Why Deleting Summoners and The League is Extra-Personal I understand that and we're working on telling the stories that will build the world and allow for a deeper understanding of Runeterra, its people, and the unique individuals who protect them—or endanger them. The issue with moving towards creating stories to explore our world, rather than giving a more encyclopaedic overview, is that you don't get all of the information up front. The advantage is that you experience the stories from within their circumstances and through the hearts and minds of the characters.

Biographies are excellent for recounting things and can be written in very entertaining ways. We want Runeterra to live and breathe in a way that means you are experiencing things as they happen. The characters will change because they grow as people do. We made the decision we did in order to make choices on the long term growth of those characters and our overall story.

The Institute of War became an issue because it was created to tell a game rather than tell a story. Its inherent structure to focus Valoran's conflict into specific areas meant we would have to consistently work around it in order to create many of the stories we are passionate about telling. There were a variety of ways that we could have done that, including destroying the IoW (Nashorzilla?). However, that would have left us with aspects of our world that we wanted to improve upon and change, which we would have to explain individually through story. Stories that would essentially be explanations, which was the main issue with the IoW in the first place.

We wanted to form a Runeterra with a foundation that allows us to go wherever we want to. A place to explore anew.

The stories, such as Shurima and the new Sion, are our first steps. Many more will follow.

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And it continued from there.