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A petition to bring Journal of Justice back.

SS Enforcer··142 votes·3,881 views

So, lately i have been thinking about the lore of league getting less and less attention, and while this design choice is uderstandable, (since some players don't give a damn) it just doesn't feel right from my point of wiev.

Let's see the pros of JoJ:

  • It is a fantastic idea, creating a sort of a newspaper for the players of the game.
  • It helps to form a picture of runeterra without cinematics or other kinds of audio or/and visual contents that require a lot of work and money.
  • I don't really know what is going on right now, but if the institue of war still exists, JoJ does not necessarily talk about it, so it can be separate from the league, so there would not be a bunch of holes lorewise.
  • It's just goddamn awesome.

And the cons:

  • It still takes a creative mind to make such a newspaper, but i trust you guys.
  • Now that you decided to erase this whole summoner-thing, if you decide to bring back JoJ, it will take a lot of material to fill in some holes. (still, you guys didn't disappoint us in terms of lore, so i trust you)

So, what do you think?

(P.S. you can still check out the existing issues of JoJ here: http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Category:The_Journal_of_Justice_Issues )

EDIT: I would hate to shatter the dreams of anyone reading this, but as you may have noticed, this is not a petition. I have no idea how to make a poll. :/

36 Comments

Sneak Dog8 votes

I disliked the perspective. It was a really distant and at times limited perspective of things. It at times felt distached from the champions to me.

I would love it as a bimonthly thing to turn this downside into an upside. Make the perspective something unique after seeing a major part of a storyline from a champions perspective. Regularly released, something interesting and unique to look forward to, but not the only medium for the main storylines. Show what an outsider thinks of this champions storyline, what the impact is of the events and details that the champion just didn't notice.

Also, put a space between your wiki link and the ')'.

still, you guys didn't disappoint us in terms of lore, so i trust you

Sadly, the narrative team has disappointed me. They replaced one of my favorite characters, Trundle, with a new one and don't even see it as a mistake.

BetaDude4011 votes

The Freljord event in general is just... Bad. ARAM, yeah, that was very nice of them to make a game mode of it. Lissandra, yes. Very good character.

Everything else? No. The Freljord event did practically nothing to advance the story or establish new details about the world. What it ended up doing instead was destroying the lore of one of my favorite champs in the game just so he could side with the person that no sane human, yordle, or armored bear would ever side with. The event had no resolution; from what I recall the event just kinda faded and was left completely open-ended with no clear winner. As far as we can tell, this civil conflict in the Freljord had been going on for a VERY long time, with absolutely nothing given to declare a victor, or, hell, someone that was winning. Instead, it just died. As far as Riot, the rest of the community, and, for that matter, the other city-states on Valoran care, it's just a minuscule little thing that affects absolutely nothing. Most people don't even remember the Freljord event, and I can see why.

Only thing it ever did was add a new game mode and champion while sacrificing the amazing lore another champion had. Poorly thought through, poorly designed, boring, and inconsequential. At least Riot knows what not to do in events now...

TheGrandAlliance1 votes

[deleted]

Baron Von Bangin3 votes

Freljord event did not establish that. The JoJ did.

rinsujo3 votes

That's been Canon since before there were other queens - Sejuani and Lissandra were both released well after Queen Ashe skin, King Tryndamere skin, and the Civil war started with Sejuani. It's newer than the lore you're talking about.

Know your history before correcting people, please. :P

Solaxo4 votes

[{quoted}](name=Sneak Dog,realm=EUW,application-id=6kFXY1kR,discussion-id=nyuzRHT4,comment-id=0001,timestamp=2015-02-04T22:45:02.735+0000)

I disliked the perspective. It was a really distant and at times limited perspective of things. It at times felt distached from the champions to me.

I would love it as a bimonthly thing to turn this downside into an upside. Make the perspective something unique after seeing a major part of a storyline from a champions perspective. Regularly released, something interesting and unique to look forward to, but not the only medium for the main storylines. Show what an outsider thinks of this champions storyline, what the impact is of the events and details that the champion just didn't notice.

Also, put a space between your wiki link and the ')'.

Sadly, the narrative team has disappointed me. They replaced one of my favorite characters, Trundle, with a new one and don't even see it as a mistake.

No. JoJ was great. i remember people constantly commenting events mentioned there

Sneak Dog2 votes

It was great for regularly bringing a lot of lore. A journal of a champion could've also done that.

Awoof6 votes

I started LoL between Jayce's and Zyra's release. I once read an interview with Shaco from the JoJ on the wiki. I have to say, that got me more interested in the/a character than anything I remember being released for lore since I'm around.

1st HanarSpectre4 votes

Journal of Justice was too limiting as a vessel for lore. So, let's cancel JoJ, retcon a lot of it, and cease to publish lore for almost 2 years. Riot logic.

Don't get me wrong, I'm assuming that there's a lot of goodwill from the riot employees behind the idea, but us as players have seen very little benefit.

DubaZuba4 votes

Yes please. A big problem I have with the current lore is a champion can't really do anything outside their bio and maybe the bio of another champ. Azir just declared Shurima a place again, has pulled its ruins from the sands, and we have to wait for another champion from there to see what happens next, if anything does.

Hyrum Graff3 votes

So, I partially agree with Sneak Dog here. I don't think it would be a good idea to do the JoJ again as it was, because I think the perspective is very limiting.

I DO think it would be a good idea to have some kind of weekly or bi-weekly story release, in whatever format (video, JoJ, story, etc, etc).

P.S. Add a poll here:

http://i.imgur.com/XIMhtga.png

Dotintheparadox2 votes

If you made an actual petition I would sign up for it, but I will still give you an upvote good sir!

Praus2 votes

I'm not sure Riot would ever continue it as I feel they are going to retcon.

Impetual2 votes

I support this idea...but I doubt Riot will act on it. For some reason they seem to be against supporting the "tried and true" lore delivery techniques that helped make LoL such a success in the first place. Their focus seems to be on e-sports now.

TheFameAnimal2 votes

Think they might do something like the joj when they have reworked the lore of everyone idk :/

Sadistic Cheese2 votes

Oh dear...another argument for/complaint about lore....

I liked the idea of the JoJ, but I can also understand where it was confining; coming up with reasons why things happened and sticking only to things that have a plausible explanation can be tough when you want to make things like the Battlecast skins, or Heartseeker skins, or any of the 'for-the-heck-of-it' stuff. It does indeed become limiting. I wouldn't mind it coming back in some form so I give you my upvotes, but....

But I'm just tired of hearing complaints about the lore and the current direction of it. I enjoyed what we had before too, but at this point every time I see someone complain about something lore-related these days I cringe and just...I'm tired of seeing lore whining. I was on the fence about it for awhile because I saw how people were unhappy but I wanted to trust in Riot. I leaned towards supporting the players for awhile but the constant influx of lore-related complaining has just worn me out. I'm tired of hearing about it. It doesn't help that a majority of the arguments/requests are things that have been argued/requested before, and I don't think I'm alone in being worn out with the entire concept of the argument.

So yeah....upvotes and my support for a good idea, but just...don't be surprised if there's not a ton of us jumping on the wagon.

Motajo2 votes

[{quoted}](name=Sadistic Cheese,realm=NA,application-id=6kFXY1kR,discussion-id=nyuzRHT4,comment-id=0007,timestamp=2015-02-05T12:07:12.361+0000)I liked the idea of the JoJ, but I can also understand where it was confining; coming up with reasons why things happened and sticking only to things that have a plausible explanation can be tough when you want to make things like the Battlecast skins, or Heartseeker skins, or any of the 'for-the-heck-of-it' stuff.

It doesn't really get in the way of the 'for-the-heck-of-it' stuff. That stuff simply isn't (or wouldn't be) canon, and can be ignored by lore development entirely.

Sadistic Cheese1 votes

problem is not the lore development team, really. The problem is the community. The lore dev team knows that non-canon skins are in fact non-canon. They'd have no problems with there not being an explanation for them, since that's their job and they kinda gotta accept that and they're professionals. They know that not everything, particularly in a game like this, needs a reasonable or plausible explanation.

...some people in the community, however, may not see it that way. I've met people in the past who were very passionate about one piece of media or another, and in almost all cases their passion translated into wanting to know reasons behind everything. Why a character did this, what was a character's backstory, why the character is wearing doing something that, to the fan, is completely out of character for that character. The phrase 'just for the fun of it' doesn't often settle things for passionate fans and fanbases.

"They wouldn't do that!" "So? We kinda thought it'd be fun to do so we did it." "BUT THEY WOULDN'T DO THAT!"

It doesn't happen with everything obviously, but there are some people who get like that, and they can get very, very frustrating to deal with when it comes to explaining that something HAS no explanation, no reason. The more rigidly defined a piece of media's lore is, the more fanatic people can be about such things. Given my experiences with that, I can see where Riot may just want to keep things vague so they don't have to deal with the headache of defending something done for fun in the face of extremely zealous fans.

VardenSalad1 votes

In a world where the Harrowing exists, it's too difficult to claim non-canon skins are costumes?

It is not hard in the least to come up with explanations for just about everything that has happened in Runeterra, the League, blah blah. The old narrative team did it. They actually did it rather well, all things considered. Remember that Riot is a company that at one point actually let the community decide the course of lore (IONIA v NOXUS) and easily followed through with the accompanying lore. We even got an item out of that (Ionian Boots of Lucidity).

Where did that company go? What happened to that lore team?

Sadistic Cheese1 votes

I agree that most things are hand-wavingly plausible. It's not hard to figure out why Battlecast skins exist, or the Pool Party skins. Battle Bunny Riven is stretching it a bit, given that Riven doesn't seem the type of person willingly dress up like that, but context in the splash-art does explain it.

I don't know where that lore team went, but I think I can at least see a reason why they went in another direction. Largely I'd think it stems from writing oneself into a corner, so to speak. Every time you explain something, you add another thing to keep track of, and you make the landscape for new ideas less big flat plain with the occasional hill and more military-grade obstacle course with live ammo being fired in the form of angry comments from the fanbase if you happen to take a wrong turn somewhere. After awhile I can see where that would get wearing and difficult to work with.

VardenSalad1 votes

You can't just use this strange topographic analogy to call everything old lore team did bad. Especially when new lore team has done at best WORSE than old lore team in an equivalent amount of time. The fanbase has been the same the entire time; people have and will always bitch about something. The only thing that's changed is Riot's approach to fanbase interaction and the number of people and time devoted to making lore. They didn't write themselves into a corner, they established a setting that they have somehow became incapable of adding content to. They were capable of doing it in the past; like I said before, what happened to that lore team?

I actually don't think Riot EVER had a lore team; it was just something picked up collectively by a bunch of employees and they got the OK to make content. As soon as someone decided to put a "greater focus" on lore, they've done nothing. Absolutely nothing. And it's so hard, as someone who's been around for so many years, to see the Olympus-sized drop-off in content in the last 2-3 years.

I don't know what happened. Does the company that exists now look like it would put in the effort to maintaining a Journal of Justice, simply in terms of fan interaction and content generation? That Riot is dead.

Stofen2 votes

Actually, it's pretty easy to spot the drop off in quality lore if you go back far enough. Just search up Riot Bagaboosh(Forgot how it's spelled) and look at when he quit/got fired and you'll notice a domino effect following his leave. JoJ shutting down, Fredjlord "update", PASSIONATE Katarina, death

12 Kills A Wave2 votes

I agree

Motajo2 votes

I'm not sure how they'd truly bring it back without the IoW, but I'll support this anyway.

Danica17082 votes

They're never going to bring back JoJ because of the fact that the Institute of War, the Fields of Justice, Summoners, and even the League of Legends itself are no longer cannon in story. Link to proof: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/creative-spotlight/dev-blog-exploring-runeterra

TL;DR Riot has stated that the IoW, FoJ, Summoners, and LoL are cannon, including the JoJ and the Judgements.

Gentleman Gaston2 votes

Rather than a unified publication that spanned the entirety of Runeterra, which doesn't make much sense in the world as we've seen it anyway, I'd rather see pieces from individual publications based on particular city factions. Rather than a detached and impersonal viewpoint we would often see in the JoJ, we would instead see a much more direct view of the factions themselves. By viewing stories through this particular lens it allows us to get a closer look into the politics of these individual city-states, and how they function: propaganda, local flavor, as well as focusing on individual champions within their own realm. However, I don't think this needs to be limited to a journalistic perspective. Take, for instance, Rek'sai's reveal: relayed as a series of letters from a Noxian stationed in Shurima. This concept seemed very well received by a lot of people and I think it's worth perusing doing something similar on a more frequent level.

Potential benefits for such an endeavor include:

  • Inspiration - By fleshing out the world and the characters you create new inspiration for the champion design and art teams. "Look at this cool aspect of the Freljord/Demacia/Piltover/Ect.! This totally puts this image into my head that I want to see [in the next champion]/[in this rad piece of art]." That, in turn, inspires the players to play those champions and create their own content surrounding them. It's a win/win.

  • Fleshing out the IP - The world as it exists to the players is very spotty right now. There are patches of lore that exist within pockets, but they don't really form a collective world as a whole. By putting out content like this you give us, the players, a better idea of what kind of world we're pulling characters from and that in turn adds to those characters. Sivir is cool, but Sivir is cooler when I know about the difficulties in Shurima and what it means to live the kind of life she does.

  • Teasing new content - Riot, you like doing this. You looooooove hinting at things to come, but you don't want to spoil the surprise. That's okay, we get that, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun. I'm not talking about Ao Shin levels of "Look at this thing we're doing right now", but I think that a character or asset making a small cameo in a story (or stories) long before it's actually revealed would make that eventual reveal all the more cooler and meaningful.

  • Repairing broken bridges - The easiest way to get Lore fans back on the Riot boat is consistent content. If you take one thing away from this wall of text please let it be this. I don't think it's insane to expect written content either monthly or bi-monthly, but at this rate it's "Whenever a champion comes out, maybe." and that's pretty unacceptable. Yes, this means a lot of work from a lot of people, but if you want the lore and your IP to be taken seriously than you need to take it seriously and give it all of the credit it deserves. If I was reading a comic or watching a TV show and it released content "whenever", regardless of how great that content was, I would stop reading/watching it. End of story. No one wants to get invested in something like that because there's no reliability or consistency. It's the same with League's lore: you can write all the wonderful reveals you want, but very few are going to want to get invested unless they can expect at least some level of consistency.

Anyway, that was a bit of a ramble. I don't expect Riot to look at this post at all and I'm pretty sure they've internally discussed similar ideas to this already. But, just to reiterate, if you take one thing away from this post: please make consistent content. Good quality, yes, but more importantly consistent.

Ale non è male1 votes

Well, JoJ was cancelled because it was tied to the other things that were removed as canon from the story. So It won't return in his old format

BUT, I think that something similar could return/be reinserted in a different format. Not something mandatory and that needed to update every week about the story of the league characters, but I guess every world has its mass media comunications, so there should a place for a journal in Runeterra. And it could be mentioned here and there, or every once in a while an article from this newspaper could pop up to explain something that is happening (either a special event or the introduction of a new character) alongside with the other forms of communicatons...

Chromatic Eagle1 votes

I hated how it was a tabloid magazine because it felt out of character for a lot of champions (don't get me started on Nidalee and Janna), though at the same time, it was nice seeing a lighthearted take on some champions (Bikini Morgana please).

But the idea of a more serious newspaper about the major events in Runeterra, or videos of a bunch of people talking about champions would be great.

John Berserk1 votes

I like the idea behind the JoJ, but I don't think it should return in the form it was in before.

I do however think it could be brought back in spirit, maybe in the form of different kinds of documents (newspapers, journal entries, etc etc) that, over time, flesh out the world and report on certain actions going on within Runeterra. It could be the inbetween/build-up to the larger events, with each entry hinting at what's to come.

It could work, so long as Riot's narrative team and gameplay team keep in constant communication and plan things together.

I know one problem is the restriction of setting specific dates for when to release new content, as opposed to Riot's current "release when finished" plan. This makes it incredibly difficult to properly have corresponding releases in a timely manner while at the same time keeping everything within their acceptable quality range. However, I think this is something Riot needs to learn to do as a company as large as they are now. They should be able to do this, to release high quality content on a regular basis and plan for the future (which I think they probably are doing, we're just not aware of it quite yet), but we've yet to see if they actually can on a consistent basis.

Some form of regular lore dosage is what we need. Comics, short stories, hell maybe even an animated series of some kind (web shorts or television). Right now, the doses of lore content we get is spaced much too far apart. We want SOMETHING in between those those large events, Riot. Anything. :c

Impetual1 votes

I greatly enjoyed the JoJ, and would love to see it back. Sadly, it wouldn't really makes sense within the retconned lore as the retconned lore doesn't make sense itself yet.

For some reason, Riot decided it would better to retcon their lore so that it didn't make sense.

posionmaster12431 votes

i would love to see how rek'sai got into the leauge shes a wild animal that even velkoz fears

Frosty Hoodoo1 votes

Would enjoying seeing weekly lore articles.

Impetual1 votes

The JoJ was the best lore delivery device Riot ever had. I have no Idea why they abandoned it...other than they may have been too lazy to keep writing it.

The JoJ was awesome, Riot please, bring it back!

Impetual1 votes

Riot produced their best lore through the JoJ. I have no idea why they wanted to stop making it as it was the best lore delivery mechanism they ever employed.

Impetual1 votes

What a surprise! A highly upvoted controversial narrative thread with no RIot response!

As expected of Riot's Community Interaction Team!

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