The lore team needs to put up or be rotated around.
I was talking to an ex Rioter on Tiwtter when they quit and when I asked who the lore head was they laughed and said no such position existed. Well there is a problem right there. The reason why the IOW constrained you is because you tried to do a free flow story and had no particular direction to go in and not one person making sure your stories all line up.
Secondly, the current writing style is border line insulting. What do I mean? Well let's take a listen to the Shurima videos. Only a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKnM6Hh5gOg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYyuH1Bp2ZI
They are giant expositions. That is not good writing. This is just a dude (Nasus) talking. You guys claimed your lore would speak for itself but the thing is that with this approach you are just yammering it at us. The story isn't telling itself. Maybe you guys didn't want to hire the voice actors to actually have a meaningful interaction but then a web comic would have actually been a lot better. This was low quality and honestly you guys removed the IOW claiming it would free up story telling and so far every story that has been told could have occurred with or without the League in place
Nothing that I have read has mentioned that IOW took complete control over the summoners either outside of the fields and even then the story said they had to work together and get better acquainted it wasn't like just hopping on to someone else's Xbox after playing your XBox so I am curious as to where a lot of these stigmas came from with the Iow as Gods almighty because your lore says the opposite. Even Lee's lore was proof that summoners weren't so great seeing as the dude blew up a village and summoned a kid corpse on accident. They were not omnipotent in the slightest. Hell, half the monster creatures are only barely contained in the League but aren't destroyed because they can't actually take them out.
Sion's lore was ok but really it was the same lore he had before with just a little more detail on his final battle which is fine with me as that fleshed him out. The problem is you retconned what people cared about with the moniker of trust us and the promise of soon (TM). The writing style needs to be made more complex because the majority of your playerbase is in the 16-25 yrs old demographic and not the 7-10. Your game is rated Teen anyway so there shouldn't be kids playing so details of violence are a non factor as it is up to parents to monitor their kids. I want meaningful interactions and actual good story telling through the characters since Riot claims that is what this was about. You say you removed the IOW so that you could get a better character driven story and we are all waiting. I have rather low expectations at this point and Shurima fell below those. There is a lot of slack to make up for but only you can do it. Unless you wanna fly people like me, CCT, Ouroboro, Captain Marvelous, 1v1meAtTurret and several other people invested in your lore out to California to fix it. I am sure we could all use a paid vacation anyway.
