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Narrative, This is Truly Disheartening

Starlighte·5/4/2015, 6:51:24 AM·212 votes·18,612 views

It's been months without meaningful dialogue. It's been years without meaningful lore. It's been too quiet, and the community's growing schism is your own fault.

Look at the front page. The passion is ebbing from this board, and the growth at which it is doing so is exponential. Your continuous silence, has created two things. It has created a divide in the community where many refuse to believe or trust you anymore. These are the people that desperately don't want to see their favorite champion next on the rework list, because they're convinced you will remove everything that made them unique. Then, there is the group of the bated-breath faithful, who are slowly suffocating in your poignant absence, and silence.

Resentment and guarded hope, that's what your community is devolving into, and where are you to revitalize it? Locked in board room meetings 16 hours a day, with neither content to present nor time to offer to your lore-faithful? I think not. Here's what my humble opinion is: you're afraid, because you have let this toxic resentment build up, and it is at critical mass after the retcon announcement. Unless you perform perfectly, you are certain your performance will be crucified. You know what? That is rightfully so.

Forgiving the 3 years of Narrative silence (and many are not forgiving that grievance) you have what; 8 months of little production and a multitude of silences since the retcon? You know you've done wrong to the community, and you think the only thing that will make it up to us is delivering perfect content. YOU ARE WRONG IN THIS BELIEF. The first step in setting things straight, is to maintain your promise of continued communication, and to stop hiding behind bullshit excuses of "If I'm on the forums, I can't produce content." Sure, that may be true, but you not only gave your word (how much is it worth to you nowadays?) but your rate of production is slow enough that nobody cares if it becomes further slowed at this point. Currently, you're fighting the growing opinion that you guys simply aren't producing anything anymore. That your department is a number larger than -1 but less than 5. That you don't care, and that you don't have the budget even if you did.

Mend the rift, talk to your community. Everyday you remain silent, you turn more people against you and make the expectations for your eventual reveal of new lores, that much more unlikely to be well-received.

With the Utmost Sincerity, A Growing-Resentful Player

223 Comments

DG Ashabel5/4/2015, 8:47:43 AM41 votes

The key problem with the narrative team's argument that they're trying to make up for their blunders by delivering to us a lot of something very high-quality and perfect is:

  1. Quality is subjective. Nobody will ever agree on the quality of anything, the best we can do is analyze objects we discuss. Furthermore, as the content's release date slips further away and people become more agitated, their desire to seek out flaws in content increases and the company's ability to satisfy them lowers.

  2. Perfection is impossible and, frankly, off-putting. Most projects with cult followings are popular precisely because they are flawed. An object that is perfect in every way has already completed itself, therefore there will be no engagement from the community because, really, there is no point in discussing something too complete to leave space for discussion.

Far as creative processes go, they drove themselves into one hell of a pit.

Jeddy0175/4/2015, 9:16:39 AM28 votes

Everytime I see a Narrative Rioter comment stating that they wish for better communication,I think about the periods of silence that usually follows.Then I think the following saying,"Actions speaks louder than words." & the Narrative team actions more speaks about their communications than the Narrative team themselves.

I'm ok with not receiving new contents for several months because I understand creating decent content takes time. What I'm not ok with is seeing comments like this....

{quoted}

Waiting to have had "all the replacement content ready.", if things had turned out the way they have, would have meant we would still not be communicating on the boards due to not being able to pre-empt the content.

That was the choice.

....then seeing months of silence from the people who said they wanted to communicate ON A REPEATED OCCASION.People will interpret that as only one thing:BULLSHIT.

I'm sure the people who are part of the Narrative are decent people...........but it doesn't seem like communicating with the players are high on their priorit-.......I'm just going to be blunt,they don't seem like they care enough to communicate.

Maident5/4/2015, 7:55:44 AM15 votes

As somebody who is working to join the industry (but barely grazed the tip of the iceberg), I can sympathize with both sides. The lore could be so much more - the players seem more capable than the writers (does Riot even have a writing team anymore?) To expound on that, communication doesn't seem to require much at all, just give a "We decided Y>X, so production will be severely set back." But the reality is that regardless of the allure of the drawing board, where "passion", "innovation", or otherwise comes together, the pipeline has a limited budget, a limited team, and an unrealistic schedule. And when push comes to shove, the Executive Producer tends to establish a priority list, whereupon I assume that establishing the new Lore delivery system is quite low. Unfortunately, there are people who care about the slow production - I daresay giving it more weight than it deserves, to judge whether or not it deserves more resources, or even to continue down the pipeline at all.

I've had the displeasure of witnessing a project go to the back burner - and some of those projects never come back. Some projects, through various stages of production, are abruptly trashed. Teams get reshuffled, you spend a month catching the new artist up to everyone else, you lose your best vfx person to some other team, and then there's Marketing. When they admit that Y>X, they not only have to take into account all the lost work on X, but they have to draft a brand new pipeline, see if they need additional money for the budget for Y, possibly try to steal people from other teams, spend time and money to get everybody on the same page - and then, after all that, actually send Y through the pipeline, with the knowledge that sometime later that they may find out that Z, all along, is the solution that they need to deliver.

Regardless of passion, desire, and budget, though, you are ultimately correct (in my opinion). The silence is eating away the community, and what the silence isn't degrading, the actions that they've thus far come into light with have been less than promising. I do realize, of course, there are NDAs - these are fairly standard and will likely continue to be for a long while. So this really needs to reach the eyes/ears of somebody who can give the permission - the person with the ability to say that they were working on X, and at the end of the day, realized that it was Y all along that they need to deliver.

Sorry for the long response, but I'm quite passionate. No TL;DR for anyone who can't be bothered.

Stars Shaper5/4/2015, 8:05:22 AM11 votes

As a huge Lore fan I'm being also rather pessimistic about it and even if my favorite champions are all getting awesome skin (Xerath, Jayce, Mordekaiser... RITO leave mah money alone!!) I am more and more driven out of the game.

I am also no in the worst shape. Both Xerath and Morde had more writing than any retconned champion but yet the lack of:

  • General world environment
  • Complete storytelling
  • Dept of characters

are al factors that make players get away from a game. Because Lore it's probably the most important thing in a fantasy world. If all we needed was shooting at eachother well there's ton of CoD games out there.

powerbats5/4/2015, 9:47:22 AM8 votes

READ CAREFULLY BEFORE DOWNVOTING OR RESPONDING:

As I pointed out in another thread basically saying the same exact thing over and over it gets old and Riot isn't going to respond anymore to what are basically amounting to in their eyes or some members of the community qq troll rant threads. Now I'm not saying that's what these are but they turn into them via the trolls and the ppl complaining about the lore or lack there of need to stop posting the same thing over and over again and again.

By constantly posting about it and either simply rewording it/rehasing it al you're doing is making it boring and stale and annoying to pretty much everyone but the apparently small group of you that wants to talk about it. Think of it this way it's like rewatching the reruns of the same show for the 10 millionth time, it gets old and turns people off.

If you think about it all you're doing is drowning out your audience and giving them stale material with old rehashed writing and what your audience wants is something new and exciting and something they can relate to and agree with. It's like you keep on cooking the same thing and serving it to your customers for years and eventually you go out of business because they didn't like it because it was the same thing over and over again.

Where's the fresh food, the fresh ingredients, the fresh IDEAS, the fresh anything. If you want to get the community on board or Riot for that matter then come up with something that will entice your audience to come back and sit at your tables. Now since I dont want to re-type everything i posted to Impetual earlier I'll copy that here.

{quoted}

Impetutal here's an idea why not come up with an alternative lore that you and the rest of you like but that would fit in with the direction Riot's going? You know you've all said you've got great ideas and such so why not put fingers to keyboards so to speak and come up with something that you think will work. It's become obvious Riot isn't goint back on their decision so instead of having people constantly make new posts about it help steer it where you think it should go.

Try giving Riot some ideas on what you and the others want by actually writing some stuff up and who knows you might get a better response or a job offer as an intern if the stuff is good. Try doing something more than just complaining about it, do something that is positive and gives good feedback with ideas storyline arcs etc. Do something along the lines of how Lucian and Thresh have a storyline arc but with some of the other champions that don't relly have anything going for them. Bring up some stuff from the old lore and tie it into the new stuff similar to how they did the Sion rework.

Since right now everytime you and the others post it's almost always the same thing and so most of the community ignores and downvotes you and Riot never responds because it's become stale. Try putting some fresh ingredients in it so to speak and leave out the negativity and you'll probably get a much better response.

I for one would like to see your vision on lore along with some of the others since if you provide good vision and good lore ideas that can work inside Riot's new direction most of the community will get behind you and Riot is more likely to take notice and look positively on that.

Perhaps if everyone would take this to heart and try it you might have better luck. Also as someones who's run their own division in a big company before it might be that the lore team isn't being allowed to discuss anything by the higher ups since that happens all the time or because they've decided the flame wars aren't worth it anymore. The latter would be because no matter what they say they're going to get flamed even if it's passing info along like they did before from those same higher ups.

Remember you can't cross back over those bridges you've burned and quite a few people on here have burned those bridges with Riot long before the Rioters burned them back. The old adage "don't shoot the messenger" holds true here.

RiotRiotJaredan6/21/2015, 9:03:37 PM6 votes

Hi Starlighte,

Here's what my humble opinion is: you're afraid, because you have let this toxic resentment build up, and it is at critical mass after the retcon announcement. Unless you perform perfectly, you are certain your performance will be crucified. You know what? That is rightfully so.

Nope, not afraid. Just busy. Though we certainly don't want to infuriate our players at all. We're just in a predicament of our own making that's causing pain. I think we've all agreed on that.

And coming on here to say we're working on things becomes just increasingly more frustrating to many players.

You're right, we're not communicating here enough, partly because of time, partly because of having something new to say. We want to give you content to talk about rather than talk about the issues due to a lack of content. I know I've done that until many of you are sick to the back teeth.

Most of that content has been related to the release or update of Champions. We have been talking when this content has been released and I've tried to follow up as much as I'm able. Riot leadership, not just Narrative, is currently discussing how to respond to the need for more story, beyond certain product releases.

We're not holding back content because we are scared it isn't good enough. Are there things that Riot or Narrative has scrapped because it hasn't been good enough? Of course, every company or creative does that.

The truth behind the current cadence is that Narrative is changing a lot, we're changing our structure and our staff to meet the future of Riot. However, as I've explained in other threads, Narrative isn't independent. We work on Product Teams that strive to make awesome things for players to enjoy. We're also working on what those priorities should be for League of Legends with leadership. You'll be seeing some of the fruits of that soon.

And again I have to say soon, which can be very annoying, and I understand that.

I agree that we should be making more story products. We're currently working on a new bio format that you will see the beginnings of in the next month. That's not all we're working on, but I really can't get into that as it would spoil the work of a number of teams.