But I think we can all appreciate their art/sound teams. Holy crap these are amazing. Every login page is always great, champion effects are amazing. Splash arts always look good.
Art/sound teams appreciation thread GO!
JacctheInsomniac8 votes[deleted]
UrPalAl2 votesI can't forgive the art team for fucking up Fiora so colossally. She's still absurdly hideous.
But god.... DAMN I can listen to hours of just dialogue.
I honestly believe Dialogue and Taunts have inspired more lore for this game than the entire narrative team by this point.
To be honest, the look kinda fits her character. I would imagine a french grand duelist to look like that, instead of the seductive appearance she used to have.
RiotRiotJaredan2 votesJust for clarity, the dialogue and taunts are mainly written by members of Champ and Champ Up who are members of Narrative.
JacctheInsomniac1 votes[deleted]
RiotRiotJaredan4 votesNarrative is a discipline (the craft of writing, creating characters and stories, and helping with thematic cohesion) that has members who work on various Product Teams (the teams that make the stuff, such as Champion and ChampUp).
The dialogue is created by the team (ChampUp for Fiora, for example), utilizing the craft of its members from various disciplines to execute on the Voice Over (such as Narrative and Audio).
Narrative isn't a separate team that produces the writing in isolation, it's the craft hub that is a part of various teams that make the things you engage with.
Lowvyr5 votesI mean I think my favorite game soundtrack is Black Ops II, but god damn the League sound team is fucking amazing. They wrote and recorded a better metal album than most metal bands could even dream of doing.
While they're artstyle may be... odd.. it works for this game, and no matter how you look at them, they're amazing.
And what is this "balance team" you're talking about? League has a balance team? I never would have known.
LastWildWonder1 votesThey wrote and recorded a better metal album than most metal bands could even dream of doing.
Be careful where you say that, them's fighting words. Metal fans, while very nice, are SUPER into their Metal and react a tad overzealous when people criticize their Metal. Then again, Smite and Ignite is the only Metal album I own.
Lowvyr1 votesI'm a diehard metal fan myself :D
Livin like Riven4 votesSay what you want? Why? The lore and the balance teams have been doing some amazing work.
The lore team has been a little slow, that is true, but amazing stories take a lot of time to concept and then create. They could rush it and put out some stuff above the average OR they can take their time and produce amazing stories. They are clearly taking their time and props to them for that. Bilgewater, this Shadow Isles followup. They are AMAZING. Maybe it is just me drooling over them as an aspiring writer, but yeah.
The balance team? The game is the most balanced than it has ever been imo. Just because the community finds something new to bitch about every 3 months don't mean the balance team isn't working properly. Some time ago it was Vayne, Riot confirmed that she is getting changes with the Marksman update. Now it is Jinx. She'll probably get some change. Then it will be Kog and Tristana. Then Corki. Then Caitlyn again and so on. If anything I'm hoping that the balance team does not in any way take feedback from players, at least the ones here at boards, because players' opinions are so conflicting and biased, if they got their way, they'll drive the game to the ground.
But anyways, my little rant put aside, yeah. The art team has to be my favorite. The sound team is fantastic as well but the art team is just top notch.
RiotRiotJaredan5 votesThey are rather awesome, no doubt.
Hellioning4 votesYes, the lore team has been taking their time. After years of nothing followed by 'RETCON EVERYTHING' I am not in a very good mood regarding lore.
And the balance team has done some really baffling decisions lately. The juggernauts isn't their fault, but I'm still kinda staring at Vayne's and Yasuo's decent winrate; for champs that are picked a lot and are fairly difficult to play, that's kinda scary.
LankPants2 votesThe balance team? The game is the most balanced than it has ever been imo.
I'd argue against that. There's a huge difference between the top champs and bottom champs for each role right now, even when you ignore champs slated for reworks like Poppy.
Just think of the difference between Thresh and Sona. It's astronomical.
Nefas1 votesLore isn't doing a good job until every champ whose lore they burned down has new lore. Jax. Nocturne. Fiddlesticks. Shaco. Plenty of others. There are still champs whose bios in the client mention the Institute of War. We aren't in positive territory right now; they are still making up for years of neglect and silence. And taking years isn't being a little slow.
Bilgewater was good, lore-wise, though there were definite points where dialogue felt clunky and unnatural. Not as much of that this time around but then there is less dialogue. Hopefully the rest of the event continues to be better. The stories have done a whole lot to add to the narrative of the Shadow Isles and the selected champs.
Sneak Dog2 votesThe lore team has been a little slow, that is true, but amazing stories take a lot of time to concept and then create.
The quality of their writing isn't being questioned, not by me at the very least. It's amazing. They're putting out some great stories as we discuss.
It's the decisions they make and the reasoning for these decisions they give. They retconned the main focus of the old lore and gave at least one objectively false argument for it in the dev blog. They bluntly removed one of my favorite champions from the game with curious reasoning and now they_ finally_ see it as a mistake.
They don't seem to care about the old lore at all. Seems to me they're making a new world from a blank slate, taking only the things they like from the old lore.
I cannot trust them with my investment. It'll just come back to bite me again. It's not exactly fun when you're expecting more stories about one of your favorite champions, but he gets reduced to a mere skin instead. I just shouldn't care about these new characters and this new world Riot is creating, and I hate that.
TurquoiseYoshi2 votesThe Arcade and Tahm Kench and URF logins are some of my favorite songs.
Wind Whistler1 votesThe Arcade and Tahm Kench and URF logins are some of my favorite songs.
Please tell me you mean URF 2014.
TurquoiseYoshi2 votesNo, I mean 2015. It's a pretty good song imo, and the manatee noises were used well.
Wind Whistler1 votesNo, I mean 2015. It's a pretty good song imo, and the manatee noises were used well.
Now that I look back at it, it was actually pretty good. However, it's extremely hard for me to listen to it and think positively of it, as I was banned throughout the entire event.
Also, I feel that URF 2014's login was far more epic than 2015. It makes my eyes water every time I hear it, and I can almost picture myself playing AP Kog'Maw and ulting everywhere.
TurquoiseYoshi1 votesI do agree that 2014 was more epic, but 2015 had more charm.
blacknerdtaku2 votesSplash arts? a lot of the splash arts look really triangly, like the assassin yi new skin.... ahri's messed up chin and what Fiora almost looked like when she updated
1011001110002 votesI can't lie, I've never had an ill-thought about the sound team. They give me eargasms in all the right ways.
League of Legends needs to release an album collection of champion themes, all made by the sound team. 
BlunterMonk1 votesThey did a couple months ago actually
1011001110001 votes15 songs, not 120+ songs. 
Rozzeta1 votesThe art team sometimes makes rather questionable human anatomy decision in their drawings, but overall a great team.
The Sounds and Music team is awesome.
LVL 5 PORO1 votesThe balance team needs to step their game up to the lore's team level.
Amberdust1 votesSound and music are two of Riot's crown jewels. They are awesome, and part of the reason I started playing League. As for the art department, they took a bad turn, trying to fix what wasn't broken. In simple terms, they turned what may have been the best splash art/model of the game into possibly the worst one: Fiora, of course. It seems they were trying to avoid sexism –which is laudable–, but ironically fell into a worse form of it ("If we can't make her beautiful, we'll make her I-want-to-speak-to-your-supervisor-ugly"). This is a video in YouTube of the original Fiora's splash art, a sped-up photoshop painting by the creator. The artist is a woman, and a truly amazing painter. Riot has sometimes reverted things –and rightly bragged a little about it– when they don't work. Fiora, and the direction their art department in general is taking vis-a-vis some female characters, would be very good candidates for taking a step back. On the other hand, the art in champions like Bard and Kindred is incredibly beautiful, deep and polished. Congratulations to Riot!
RecurringExtra1 votesYou can hate anything about Riot, but the Sound Team are so good at what they do that I don't understand how you could dislike them.