Riot, will we ever hear a true, candid, argument in favor of your lore retcon?

Impetual·11/17/2014, 9:47:27 AM·62 votes·5,821 views

Seriously,

the idea the that Summoners were too powerful didn't make much sense. Lee Sin himself had some training in the ways of a summoner and he wasn't crazy powerful.

Heck, in LoL's lore Summoner's weren't ever depicted as being stronger than champions. They just had the ability to summon them, and use summoner spells.

Riot please, we need more context. Your new lore direction doesn't make sense in relation to League of Legends.

111 Comments

CupcakeTrap11/17/2014, 5:14:33 PM29 votes

Heck, in LoL's lore Summoner's weren't ever depicted as being stronger than champions. They just had the ability to summon them, and use summoner spells.

I think it's pretty clear that a Champion is much more powerful than just about any number of Summoners. What we Summoners have going for us is that we have lots of "book-smarts" and more versatile magic. Combat-wise, a Summoner isn't all that impressive, when not being used as intended: to support Champions. A Champion with a Summoner watching their back and channeling more power to them is much more effective than a lone Champion. In terms of stature, rather than raw "power", Champions are heroes and celebrities, and we're their backup. The nicer Champions treat Summoners respectfully; the others are more dismissive. We work for them, not the other way around. In some formal sense, the League favors Summoners, with Champions as guests in our international forum, but in a practical sense they've got more pull back home, where the real power lies. But it's not a competition, Pam! We work together.

The League, all-powerful? Not at all. It's got some power, and a lot of knowledge about magical affairs, but its power lies almost exclusively in the mandate it holds from the nations of Valoran. It's (sometimes grudgingly) respected as the main source of international law in Valoran.

As for why Narrative did this, most likely:

People like us are not their target audience
They brought in a bunch of people to "redo the lore", and these outsiders did it in the least Riot way possible
They want a Runeterran MMO or something, and no longer see making a story for League of Legends as their primary objective
They're personally ambitious, and like many artists they crave a blank slate and want total control; if they dislike something, they want to be able to obliterate it (which I consider a problematic desire when working on an organic story-verse with an active community)
They want something that's easy to make toys and other products about
They're embarrassed by their indie past and are tossing out everything that's kind of quirky or distinctive in favor of industry-standard varnish

It's also entirely possible that they just screwed up. It's hard to imagine Riot hiring a team like that, but maybe they really did just fail to seriously try to understand the League and Summoners. Maybe they really didn't know that there was an active lore community in the path of their bulldozer.

I don't think it's malice. I think it's just them not caring about us. We're super-hardcore lore people, and we'll keep doing our League of Legends lore, even if it means diverging from their Leagueless League lore in a few places. We're already invested.

Silver5aruman11/17/2014, 10:37:44 AM24 votes

Unfortunately it's hard for Riot to admit they made a mistake. I'd love to have the past few months of lore completely gone, that awful Harrowing timeline, the cheesy Shurima videos, the very strange Gnar/Braum storylines all forgotten so we can just start fresh. If they want to get rid of the League of Legends from League of Legends there should at least be an event.

OJ19111/17/2014, 12:19:29 PM13 votes

err delonix I'm pretty sure the league was just the magical equivalent of nuclear disarmament treaties, they didn't stop all wars

and there are many ways to get rid of the summoners without having to retcon them, if you still wanted to get rid of them

Chromatic Eagle11/17/2014, 12:34:48 PM9 votes

The summoners were powerful. That was the point of the League. Helping to control the use of their magic before they ruin the world further. On top of that, they were able to capture several champions and summon them from other worlds.

All of that didn't make them unbeatable however. It didn't give them godly vision on everyone despite their judgments. There were several ways Riot could've nerfed the summoners. They were already trying to retcon some characters to be born on Rumeterra before the massive retcon.

delonix11/17/2014, 11:35:32 AM7 votes

The problem with summoners wasn't that they were "OP" and had to be removed for balance reasons. They were too powerful because they could solve problems easily. Lore is basically just stories, and stories need conflict. When you have a group of wizards powerful enough to do stuff like containing Fiddlesticks or turning a tree into a conscious being as an unintended side effect, it becomes very difficult to write stories that don't end suddenly with "because magic." On top of this, the Institute of War is designed to prevent any conflict outside of the League of Legends. There's a lot of great lore that comes out of the wars between Noxus and Demacia, and specifically from the Noxian invasion of Ionia. Anything like this is now impossible, because all outside conflicts are just transferred into the League of Legends to be settled.

There are only so many ways to generate new champions in a world like this. Eventually it starts to get weird. Azir had to be resurrected, Gnar was frozen in a block of ice for centuries, Vel'koz came from the void, eventually there won't be anywhere original for champs to mysteriously appear from. The champs that are less mysterious are equally problematic. What was Braum doing between the creation of the League and his joining it? Herding sheep? Herding poros?

Getting rid of the summoners forces the champions in the League of Legends, as well as all of the other inhabitants of Runeterra, to solve problems on their own. Sivir doesn't work for a bunch of wizards anymore, so she has to accept contracts to guide rich Noxians into Shurima so she has money to buy food. Cait and Vi have to team up to catch Jinx and send her to Piltover prison instead of having the summoners just magic her away. Kalista can interact with other champions outside of the league without the summoners stepping in to preserve complete peace.

I hope that helps give some context for the lore change, as I understand it.

Winged Hussars11/17/2014, 9:20:52 PM3 votes

Let me put it this way. The summoners WOULDN'T have been a problem if they were treated consistently from the start, but they suffered from years of additions without much forethought. One problem is power scales. Summoners control magic that could destroy the world. Kayle and Morgana, both hyper-powerful immortal beings could not stand against summoner magic. LeBlanc and Lee Sin could? Nocturne could be controlled, Fiddlesticks and Mordekaiser could do what they want?

Yes, you could argue that changes could make it more consistent, but they would be systemic changes pretty much as large as the retcon.

Volt Cruelerz11/17/2014, 4:30:39 PM2 votes

Simply put, think of League as a franchise. I recently met with a few rioters and among other things, they placed HEAVY emphasis on the "s" in Riot Games. Players are attached to the champions, not the actual League of Legends entity within the lore. Consider the amount of power the Summoners have. At one point, they froze time across an entire battlefield for what was it, a week? Lee Sin accidentally obliterated a town. For the sake of turning league into a franchise, getting rid of the lore was necessary.

That said, the way they did it is... problematic... First off, Azir, Xerath, Syndra, and Veigar ought to be near-omnipotent now. At least before you could make the argument that the League was inhibiting their true power, but now you've got beings that built a city within seconds, destroyed an entire civilization within an instant, once made a castle float on a whim, and unstoppably grows in power, all of which are now uninhibited (aside from Xerath). The lore on all those champions is rather broken right now.

EDIT: how is this so downvoted? All I said was that they seem to want to make a franchise and getting rid of summoners gives them more freedom and then saying they didn't do it the right way, removing the only justification for why some champions' power-level in-game doesn't match up with their power in the lore.