With the Swain reveal, let's look at the champ up russian roulette tally

I've described the visual, story, and thematic side of champ up as a game of Russian roulette in the past. The champ up team terrifies me and I often find myself hoping that they don't touch champs I like, because they're so incredibly inconsistent. Sometimes they do an amazing job, they hold to the theme of a champion and modernize it and expand upon it while keeping to it. A good recent example would be Xin. Other times they shotgun blast the champion right in the fucking skull and make a new one with the same name.

I was wondering how the Swain update ended up and the first place I usually look is redmercy, and here was the literal first impression given of the champion:

> At the end of the day, let's be completely honest here I mean this is hardly even Swain this is pretty much a new champion. The only resemblance that the two have is essentially that they're both called Swain. That's about it in my opinion I mean he feels and plays and looks and everything like a new champion.

So I just wanted to look at the past updates. To look at some survivors of updates vs those that got old yeller'd.

Survivors (Still needs a traditional skin, but aside from that)

Shot in the heads

and now

Now this is obviously a pair of subjective lists. People may not think that the likes of MF or Trist or Kat or Talon were big enough deals to be on the list, but I think they came alongside some good lore that expanded rather than replaced, which is why I added them. These also aren't lists of simply good/bad reworks, as there would be 4 's as well as others on the bad list.

And it's interesting when I hash it out. I've been very critical, unpleasantly critical, of the updates. So to see how often they can do really good stuff compared to the lazy outputs that end up being so frustrating. It makes me think:

> I think this reveals a huge part of what the writer and the champ pod were aiming for - Swain was a champion who didn't provoke a lot of strong feelings either way, as PE just articulated very clearly. Based on a LOT of player data and feedback, old Swain not particularly interesting to a lot of players. Now there are a lot MORE players who want to find out more.

>It's okay not to like something, it's okay to have the opposite opinion... But it's not okay to say that person's enjoyment is invalid because they aren't a real fan, or whatever.

This quote from Scathlocke brings up an interesting point. The idea that Swain wasn't interesting or particularly compelling. But what is the cause of that? The most I can find about swain is Two paragraphs in his bio and some side comments by other champions. Would people have been more interested in him, would he have had more draw if a years worth of effort was put into expanding what existed in the story and art instead of designing a new champion and lore to take his spot?

It's also interesting how much focus is put on respecting the enjoyment of the new thing while and at the same time not respecting the enjoyment players had of the old thing.

Warwick and Urgot's backgrounds were heavily changed, but not to the extent that you feel like it's a different champion. More like the difference between two different cultures speaking about the same legend. The architecture of the story was the same, but small details were changed. Added to the massive respect paid to the gameplay and they feel very successful.

Really I thing the thing that bugs me so much is that the team show's how good they can be, then every once in a while they say "Fuck it, it's too hard" and just destroy something without consideration or respect for the following that they already built up.

This was rambling I know, I wrote this as I thought it, but it's an issue I've had for a long time, and It's really unfortunate. Maybe I'm just too critical, but they say they want feedback and I really feel like the intermittent refusal to work within what already exists is just a lazy tragedy compared to a lot of the stuff that they've shown they can do.