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@RiotLoreTeam A very polite plea to break the silence

Vellich0r·9/28/2014, 7:15:44 PM·18 votes·3,146 views

Hello ladies and gentleman, I am Marik, a lover of lore and player of league. I come here today before Riot humbly asking the lore team of Riot to take a risk, break the silence, and make the lore fans love you for once. I have heard of in the past when a select few people went too far in their anger, and understand that such could cause some hesitation in returning to the forums; however, I would like to bring a few key facts into play.

-The people who are inappropriately negative make up a very small piece of the population who are worried about lore. There are still some who will be strongly negative (mostly due to the silence to be honest) but that should not be a reason for silence if you look at my next point.

-Breaking the silence and having more active dialogue will quiet the proverbial, "Lions Den" that riot tamat mentioned in an earlier discussion. The overall negative light towards the lore team wasn't there from the beginning, but was instead created by a lack of communication with the lore fans who really only want to help make their beloved games story more awesome for them AND the majority of riots customers. in other words silence is making this issue and silence WILL NOT help to solve this issue.

-You don't need to reveal details of your super secret plans to comfort people who dont like the direction you are going at this moment. I know you may have some super cool idea set up to make the lore better, and some of the things we are unhappy about might be fixed later but with a special plan in mind, but you don't need to spoil that in order to talk to us and comfort us that, yes, their is a plan and a reason. After all, even the coolest of surprises won't help mend a relationship thats destroyed from a lack of communication (considered using a long metaphor to demonstrate this concept but decided against it :p)

-Actually keeping active dialogue with the biggest lore fans will help you as a team make better and more positive impact on the games story. It's no secret that game fans tend to be really good at telling what customers of a video game will like in a story, thus it is no difficult leap to say that listening what we have to say and keeping an open channel where we can talk back and forth will be mutually beneficial. We get to know that you actually care about what we say and think about the story to a game WE are putting money into (yes its free to play, but most people still put tons of cash into it) and you get to have a better story AND a fan base that is no longer overwhelmingly negative towards you.

-You can make friends! yeah i know that doesn't seem like the best of reasons but its true. There is nothing more gratifying than making something awesome then having people tell you, "wow riot opelli, you are the coolest. you always talk to us and make the best stuff! I want to be a big time super cool riot person like you some day!" or something like that. To me this is an undervalued point. Go ask riot girl how it feels when she has a conversation with a really nice League player and she will probably tell you that its great. Or Phreak, everybody loves Phreak.

TL;DR

To kill the lions den, and make the fans happy, just communicate. Make a discussion that apologizes for the silence and asks us to bear with you as you start to keep a more active dialogue with us. Make sure the people who you are making the stuff for feel like you really care about what they think ^.^

I believe in you guys!,

Your awesome, sexy, fantastic, loving, endearing, superbly world endingly humble fan,

Marik Winters :D

Here is the link to the article that led me to use the Lion's Den metaphor

30 Comments

Shokah9/29/2014, 5:07:47 AM7 votes

What I would like to see is more explicit credit for who is writing what part of the lore. If I pick up a comic book (or any other medium) I know who's doing what. Helps me to avoid certain authors and I don't feel let down when someone who's work I dislike is bad (in my eyes).

It's much nicer to look forward to something when I know the author's previous work. This work's in other parts of Riot (I know if Xelnath's working on something, I look forward to it) so why is the Lore team hiding who does what?

You can't have a discussion with "Narrative", you can only have a discussion with people.

Dotintheparadox9/29/2014, 5:40:48 AM6 votes

I'm actually going through and deleting my more hostile posts, I got swept up in the stupidity... I just felt kind of insulted, I guess, like, you have all of these awesome characters, they don't get touched for years, and then... they just change, with no warning, as a not-even a start-up writer yet, the biggest thing I have tried to believe in is giving respect to the characters above all else, and the Institute was sort of a character to me, it had an important identity, that helped form other ones. I don't care about changing things to the point where they make more sense, that should always be allowed, that's what a good retcon does, just don't disrespect the characters please, that's all I want.

And I only learned about Abernathy leaving because of a Twitter link, I don't even use twitter, so I wouldn't of known otherwise. So, if the lore team (By some impossible chance) sees my post here, please do not use Twitter solely, that should not be the only manner of information we get. The reddit-esque format of the boards is probably much better for this kind of input as well. It's completely ridiculous having to bump the same new thread every 5 seconds just to keep it on even the second page

Anyways, I'm sorry for making an ass of myself over the past week, and I wish for a more active conversation in the following time.

LordHippoman9/28/2014, 9:12:54 PM5 votes

They broke the silence. If you remember, they then received upwards of 10 pages of "you suck" "you should all be fired" "dumb broad" "I'll shove my *@#- in your +=@" and so on.

Lore team has admitted time after time they screwed up in their approach, and they've tried to explain it. It's time for us to accept that apology, be willing to discuss without flaming and making a new topic everyday about how awful the new lore is and it's not comparable to Game Of Thrones or whatever, and get back to discussing Lore instead of the Lore team.

You don't have to be happy with their decisions. I'm not. But we do need to understand that it's their story, not ours. They'll do what they want with it. Technically, they don't have to listen to us at all! But they're offering. They have extended the olive branch and given us a condition, stop chomping at their hands. Lets do that, and get back to the days when Riot Shurelia could post on the Lore Forum and tell us all the shopkeeper was "Manbaconian", and nobody batted an eye.

Dreamspitter9/29/2014, 1:40:32 AM5 votes

WHO IS THE LORE TEAM ? Tom Abernathy left on Twitter

Garentheon9/28/2014, 9:50:52 PM4 votes

"...and make the lore fans love you for once."

You are speaking for too many people. I like the new direction. I loved them before and I love them even more now

Tesla Effect9/28/2014, 9:36:27 PM4 votes

Its obvious, WE WANT THEM TO TALK, but with a nice tone we all do :3

Magpies9/29/2014, 4:38:56 PM4 votes

Riot is the metaphorical parent in this situation, they don't have to give us anything no matter how much we scream, we plead, or we ask nicely. Why not? Because they said so. Esports is where their money is, not lore. Lore is something that they can risk ignoring what everyone wants. Lore is something they can risk destroying. And because Riot is unable to properly moderate / restrict forum posts, and because they blatantly ignore people on their own forums time and time again, they have created a hostile environment where quite often people -do- hate them.

No one likes being ignored. No one likes being threatened either, but RIOT is the one with all the power. THEY make the choice to listen to the screaming radical minority, slap labels on the whole forum community, and ignore people who genuinely want to learn from them or ask questions.

I tried it, plenty of people have tried it. Asking nicely gets you nothing more than any other way of asking. They don't care.

Stars Shaper9/28/2014, 9:08:22 PM3 votes

I totally agree

Flintfall9/29/2014, 1:09:06 AM2 votes

The people who "love League's lore" and do nothing but complain about it confuse me, and I wish they provide such a hostile environment for the lore team to go into because I would love active dialogue between us.

Imagine every day there would be heated debates between Riot and community about stuff like Draven and Darius's relationship, or if the Darkin are already in the League, or whether or not Swain has bigger plans outside of Noxus.

That'd be way cooler than talking about what could have happened with the Institute of War...

Chromatic Eagle9/29/2014, 8:32:01 PM2 votes

How are we supposed to do that if we have no moderating power? Most forums allow us to report toxic posts, and in game we can do the same. For some reason, Riot has never thought about doing the same to their forums. Even with the revamp.

So again it falls on us to moderate a community when it should be their job to do so.

Dotintheparadox9/29/2014, 10:23:44 PM2 votes

By the way, you should probably ask people who vote on your poll to vote on the thread's board rating as well.

Also, guys, if you see my post, please vote on this.

Sneak Dog9/28/2014, 10:07:53 PM1 votes

I would love them were it not for Trundle. I posted quite a bit about him, but never got any feedback that Riot cared about him else than the concerns that he might not be the same troll might be valid. Great. I don't even think it was a lore person posting that. Got lots of discussion with other players but only got to a point where I saw how close they came with the background, but it most definitly is not the same troll and I'd love to know what Riot thinks of this with their whole "preserve identities" vision.

Right now all I can do is complain to a brick wall and resist investing in this lore where one of my favorite characters has been retconned into oblivion and where, if I were to dive into it, it could just happen again for all I know.

Edit: Just wanted to make clear: as far as I know I've had the constructive discussions, I've done all that, it's out there, I'll be happy to repeat it but I don't expect anything new to come out of it anymore. I don't think there'd be anyone to discuss with either, so I don't spam the board with another Trundle thread. I try to stay constructive, but all I want is for Riot to say their thoughts on Trundle. He's been this glaring proof of the new lores disregard for maintaining identities for so long it's just frustrating to still have no clear response on it.

CupcakeTrap9/30/2014, 7:47:59 PM1 votes

I think this thread (which started in regard to the forum redirect but quickly expanded beyond that topic to become a discussion about lore and community engagement) should be linked here.