Boards›Story, Art, & Sound

Why has Riot refused to capitalize on the assets they produced for Burning Tides?

GrievousFetus·5/14/2017, 6:01:42 PM·13 votes·1,066 views

Burning Tides, Bilgewater's lore update, was probably the single best large scale update League has ever had aside from possible the new Summoner's Rift introduced in season 4 preseason/season 5.

I was extremely disheartened to hear that Riot said they will never be doing a large scale lore update like this again in the future, and was confused when they said that the reason for this was because it was "too much work for too little pay off" (paraphrasing). I don't understand why these lore events have been discontinued on the grounds that they have little to no pay off for all the hard work involved.I'm not sure why Black Market Brawlers isn't in the featured game mode rotation when it's clearly the alternate game mode with the most unique assets and effort. I'm not sure why Riot has made no effort to monetize all of the assets they've already created. The prospect of selling the already existing Burning Tides assets (Gangplank announcer pack, murder bridge map skin, minion skin packs, alternate game music) at premiums is only more relevant because Dark Star Singularity has delivered us an additional alternate announcer (Dark Star Thresh) and new music and a new potential summoner's rift skin if the cosmic ruins were ever expanded, and there is of course the blood moon and winter rift alternate maps too.

Does Riot simply not have the infrastructure to implement map skins, announcer packs, etc.? It seems like the excuse that a giant lore event like Burning Tides can't happen because it has too little pay off rests on the idea that Riot is either not currently capable or unwillingly to capitalize on the assets they've already created.

10 Comments

GreenLore5/14/2017, 6:18:48 PM8 votes

I think they didn't say that they'll never do an event like this again. Its just that they choose not to do one for now because they want to finish the retcon first.

And making an event like this simply costs a lot of time and resources,so of course it is faster if they do these updates without events. I mean we've got 11 lore updates in 2015(4 Bilgewater champs,5 Shadow isles champs,Fiora and Poppy),the year in which we had the bilgewater event.Meanwhile we had pretty much twice as much in 2016 with 21 full lore updates(Shen,4 Targon champs,8 Shurimachamps,3Shadow isles champs&5 Piltover champs) and several short stories that were released with the universe site(Jax,Lee sin,Fiddlesticks,etc.)

And now in 2017 we've got already 19 lore updates for champions(8 Zaun champs,7 Demacia champs and 4 Vastaya) and we aren't even in the second half of the year.

I really doubt this speed would be possible for the lore team if they were still making events like the bilgewater one.

As for why they don't release the GP-announcer or the map: Well the thing is that riot likely did not decide how to handle these things in general.

ReisenTheDos5/14/2017, 8:54:52 PM2 votes

The Bilgewater event will always disappoint me with how much effort was put into GP's visual update compare to MF's. Mainly in the VOs. And then with the icons you can win, it is either of TF, or Graves for the first two sets. For the final set choices it was either GP or a TF and Graves combination, ignoring MF completely.

Otherwise it was a fun event and strange how Black Market Brawlers has yet to make a return. There was a Riot comment a while back explaining why the map hasn't made a reappearance but I don't recall exactly what post it was since I read it at surrender@20.

Also sorry about that first paragraph. Just a lot of pent up rage of what Riot could have done better for MF.

Blood Magicks5/15/2017, 6:25:26 AM1 votes

Riot has had a habit of breaking their promises if the fans protest about it hard enough (eg no new multi character cinematics, Graves cigar).

Make enough of a noise about it and they may budge. Godspeed, brother.

Sett a trap5/17/2017, 10:41:02 PM1 votes

I'd pay $20 USD for the gangplank announcer pack.

Honestly Riot is kinda stupid af at times. Like people are willing to shove money into their faces for an asset already made but they won't do it.

Like what.