Based on what has been revealed... the new lore simply isn't ready to be shown.
It lacks the qualities that made the old lore special, and unique to the League of Legends.
It lacks in originality, scope, and humor.
Nothing that the lore team has produced within the last year has come close to the quality the old lore had (except the Sion Re-write).
LordHippoman7 votesAs a fan of the old Lore, I am disappointed by the approach to the new Lore, but I'm also disappointed by the community reaction. We lost a lot of good posters because they tried to show support for the retcon, which I'm not a fan of, but the reaction was just visceral as all hell.
Not to mention at least two Lore team members quit immediately afterwards. It's just a mess all around. A large amount of the really terrible shit that got said was from GD or random trolls who saw the chance to attack the Reds in a bad spot.
I really miss the Forums. I don't see the point in boards, just seem like a needlessly complex Reddit clone.
I'm hoping we can achieve a kind of equilibrium between Narrative's vision for the new Lore and what was so great about the old Lore. I think the peak status of the Lore, both in storytelling and community, was around 2011-2012, when the JoJ was still going strong, Kalamanda was really interesting, and we had a lot of fun discussions on the Lore Discussion boards.
Legacy of Xion7 votesAs a fan of the old Lore, I am disappointed by the approach to the new Lore, but I'm also disappointed by the community reaction. We lost a lot of good posters because they tried to show support for the retcon, which I'm not a fan of, but the reaction was just visceral as all hell.
Not to mention at least two Lore team members quit immediately afterwards. It's just a mess all around. A large amount of the really terrible shit that got said was from GD or random trolls who saw the chance to attack the Reds in a bad spot.
I really miss the Forums. I don't see the point in boards, just seem like a needlessly complex Reddit clone.
I'm hoping we can achieve a kind of equilibrium between Narrative's vision for the new Lore and what was so great about the old Lore. I think the peak status of the Lore, both in storytelling and community, was around 2011-2012, when the JoJ was still going strong, Kalamanda was really interesting, and we had a lot of fun discussions on the Lore Discussion boards.
I'm not saying Riot fu - okay, I am saying Riot fucked up in every concievable way, but the trolls and visceral downers cast a shadow on the people like CucpcakeTrap, Philomelle, Terra Rising, myself to a degree, and many others who are vocal about this atrocious retcon and are being respectful and not threatening to rape Opeli.
But because of that viscous minority in the Lore community, the Lore Team has alienated itself instead of searching for the real community that wants connections and wants a voice. Instead they post here and there, answer few questions, and then disappear. They preach about wanting to strengthen their lines of communication with us, then do nothing. It's been months since the /ff from narrative thread where Narsil and jaredan jumped into the fires and the flames to try and help, weeks since Jaredan gave us the Azir and Xerath lores, and many months since the entire retcon was announced.
In those months, many champions are reduced to mere paragraphs. Stories are broken, characters in a limbo of identity, stuck with no way to move on. And Riot's Narrative Team sits in their ivory tower doing their thing alone, instead of taking this disaster and bringing in the people who have proben to know the lore better then themselves - the hundreds upon hundreds of lore fan who have taken to these boards in vehement disagreement and outright hatred of this retcon.
We don't need equilibrium - we need them to realize their vision is hated by 80% of the people who actually know the lore exists.
LordHippoman8 votesI would disagree with that "respectful" bit. It's a vicious cycle.
And this is way more communication than the kitae years, in which we got 5 posts in the Lore Forum in an entire year.
Just look at the title of the thread you mentioned. "I guess it's /ff from Narrative". That's inherently disrespectful. The thing is that you can't know the Lore better than the authors do. It's their universe, and what they say goes. You can not like it, I don't like it, but we can't say that they aren't allowed to make changes, because we are not the authors. That's what fanfiction is for.
But you're right, a ton of characters are totally stuck. But they have been for years now. Freljord ended as soon as the climax started. After the JoJ ended, almost no stories have gone anywhere, nothing has happened, and new characters are added that don't change the story in any way. Aatrox is a super powered monster who can make people fight better just by standing next to them, and singlehandedly propel an entire army to victory. What has he done in the story? Jackshit.
Those issues totally existed before the retcon too. Which is why the JoJ era is, IMO, the model Lore should be following, because something happened in every issue. They could be minor things, but the world was progressing, instead of adding in more and more characters and factions we know won't do anything interesting any time soon.
Legacy of Xion6 votesYes, a lot of people have been disrespectful. The name of that thread, inherently, was disrespectful.
But you missed my point. Many of the people who are respectful, who truly try, are overshadowed and forgotten because of the vehement minority crying for blood. Many of the respectful ones are drowned out by the disrespectful, which is proven by your disagreement with the respectful bit. See how that all just fell into place?
As for the JoJ era, I wasn't around during then. I came far after the Journals and the Judgements ended, and I for one believe that discontinuing those forms of medium was a poor decision - the JoJ gave us information as well as hilarity, intrigue and political drama. Jump over to the Judgements....just look at Lux. Case in point dammit! It gives us such a view of Lux as a character, more then this happy go lucky girl who's confident and fires lasers. She's here to fight because she has nothing else.
Yes, they should return to the JoJ era. Because I'd rather read the judgement of Lux tenfold then re--read Azir's Lore, or Xerath's. I'd rather read the Journal then four lines on Ezreal's page.
LordHippoman5 votesYou definitely make a solid point. I think the whole idea of the "outspoken minority" is false a lot of the time, but I've admittedly rolled my eyes and downvoted posts before actually reading them and thinking "You know, this is a really good point." based on the first few sentences before. I'll own up to that. The whole discussion is so discolored by all the hate that's been spit by people on both sides that it can definitely effect even the most level headed among us, I think.
And I wish you had gotten to experience the JoJ. It was really an exciting time for storytelling, because there was always something new coming, and we rarely had to worry about it overwriting something we were familiar with. It wasn't perfect, but it felt real, it felt fun, and it felt like there was a world worth getting into and writing about. The Judgements were the same way. Just knowing a little more about the champions helped flesh them out so much more. It was a guarantee that face value alone wouldn't be the only way we got to see that character, and I think that really shows in a lot of the characters released right after Judgements stopped. They just aren't as interesting. I think that's why everyone is so upset about the retcon. It shatters this world that a lot of people felt really invested in, because the League is the centerpiece. Runeterra still exists, Demacia still exists, Noxus still exists, but it's so strange without the thing that brought it all together.
I guess it was easier for me to take because I looked at it as a story. I'm trained by hours of droning college courses to dissect a story into elements like Background, Thematic Content, and that kind of stuff. I loved the Lore, hell, still do, but I wasn't the kind of guy who thought of himself as a character. But I see a lot of people did now. The "summoner" stuff really called to a lot of people, I suppose, and I can see how that being gone all of a sudden would be way more shaking for them.
I realize that a lot of League's lore was, in a technical writing standpoint, dumb. It's an excuse plot, really, probably not one that was thought of before the game mechanics were. They needed a way to excuse five on five matches and came up with the League. But when you're so used to that, it starts feeling a lot more concrete and interesting.
The reason the JoJ was cancelled was that a lot of people thought it was too long. But with the reaction to the shortened lores and the release of the much longer than standard bio Xerath/Azir stories, I think there's sufficient evidence to prove that there are, at least now, a substantial subset of people who are willing to read all of that. But Lore kind of has to compete against the other aspects of the game, and if Riot wants to keep making money and making their game (How many other companies can succeed with just one product? And a free one at that?), they can't really divert resources away from the big draws, like Esports and new skins. Lore fans have kinda historically always had to make do with what we have, so I guess that's where I'm coming from when I really loved the Xerath stuff even if it changed his character in a really major way. We hadn't just suddenly gotten new Lore since JoJ, and that felt nice.
This is getting really long, so I guess what I mean to say is that yeah, there's a reason to complain. There's a lot of discussion that needs to happen, but it's having trouble coming out because of the general anger in the air right now. I'm hoping cooler heads prevail, really.
DG Ashabel6 votesHey now, let's be completely honest. While myself, Cupcake and Terra never outright attacked anyone on the lore team (I firmly believe one should dislike the work, not the author), none of us are very easy to deal with. Cupcake runs a major community website dedicated to a gameplay mode that combines lore with gameplay, her position needs to be invested by the definition. On my side, I am a very terse and blunt person who tends to lay out issues without mincing words, which can get very overbearing for an unprepared person.
Worse yet, most of us argue with evidence and academia. Not only did we pull out examples that contradict the narrative's statements, but plenty of us are well-versed in art and cultural history (I studied it in university), and some of us have experience in game design. Dealing with arguments that are cold logic hurts when you're a writer and used to more subjective arguments such as the story's content. You're more or less forced to consider that the content you're putting out won't be valued as art regardless of how much people like it.
It's even worse when the reason your content is weak has nothing to do with your efforts as a writer. Instead it has everything to do with the part where you're a writer for a 1000+ strong corporation who puts 90% of its resources into eSports, leaving your ability to put out good content stuck in the hamsterwheel of bureaucracy, being unable to consult higher-ups about your artistic vision half the time and instead having someone from the marketing team who breathes down your shirt and growls about where your career will end up if your short story won't sell them a thousand champions/skins.
And that last part is made worse by the fact that most marketing executives these days are completely clueless as far as game industry is concerned, they don't realize how fast it's evolving and don't understand that the content they're trying to push out doesn't actually benefit them. They don't understand that video game communities are built on individual activity instead of consumerism, meaning that their attempts to create marketable lore will actually hurt them in long term. They also assume the market is the same as two decades ago and don't realize the gaming crowd is actually 48% female, which means pushing out content like the recent Kayle and Ahri splash arts actually causes more public embarrassment than profits.
tl;dr Yeah, I stand by a lot of things I said to the Riot writers and I maintain that none of it was meant as a personal attack. That doesn't change the part where so much well-structured criticism hurts, neither does it change the part where being an artist in a corporate environment that only cares about profits and eSports doesn't do much for your self-esteem or freedom for self-improvement in the first place.
LordHippoman6 votesOh, I meant no insult to people like you, Xion, Cupcake, etc. You guys have good points. I mean sure, I don't agree with all of them, but I can't say you make baseless accusations or anything, and I think you're smart people. I might not agree with the frustration, but I do understand it.
You really hit the nail on the head here. I think making big lore changes is a lot easier said than done, because there is just so much Riot's narrative team probably has to go through. Not only is there getting approval from the higher ups, but they have to get approval from their higher ups presumably, the people at Tencent, who aren't exactly famous for being easy to work with. (Buying out internet cafes and such in China to make them uninstall DOTA 2 and stuff like that to replace it with LoL, etc.)
CupcakeTrap can sort of do what he wants in Factions, because he doesn't have to ask if it's okay with Marc Merrill and then wait for him to ask if it's okay with the guys over in China. So his efforts as a writer, while definitely no less viable than Riot's, are a bit easier to get across to the Factions fanbase, which is getting really big now because he knows what he's doing with it, and that story is constantly progressing, which I think is something that's missing from the canon League lore nowadays. Hopefully that serialized Lore CarnivalKnights mentioned comes to fruition.
I'm sure there are people on the Lore team who'd like to give spoilers as to where it's going, for example, to try and stem the tide of "You probably haven't even thought about that.", but last time RiotNasus got drunk and leaked some really minor information, he was fired. Serif got fired after posting that Taric He-Man song parody. And they weren't just random interns, Nasus had a champ named after him and Serif was one of the most beloved off-topic posters. There are definitely limits as to what you can do without corporate approval.
It's a tough environment to be a writer in when about 95% of players would rather hear about what the ADC for Samsung Blue had for lunch than a JoJ article about the characters in game. If you ask most LoL players who Garen is, they won't say a knight in service to the Lightshield dynasty of Demacia, they'll say "a spinning top lane guy". And honestly, it's hard to blame them. The Lore department is really shafted sometimes.
DG Ashabel4 votesOh no, I didn't think you meant any insult to anyone. I'm just acknowledging that no matter how highly Xion seems to think of certain people's involvement in this entire debacle, none of us are exactly making it easier for the lore team. Cupcake is heavily invested by the value of co-running a major gameplay mode, I'm an abrasive smart-ass and all of us can get prickly. And once they're done dealing with our pointed questions, they have to deal with people like GenociderX, who more or less admits to harassing people for kicks.
I'm sure that in the end of the day, both players and the narrative team are simply caught up in the horrid maelstrom of Riot Games transforming into this monstrous corporate juggernaut that looms around and howls about eSports while accidentally trampling all other goodwill they built up with the community. The best we can do is hope that the company recovers its bearings and realizes that the current approach runs the risk of them fading away as soon as eSports are mainstream enough to no longer need the focused support of one company.
I do think the "didn't think it through" aspect is very true, but not entirely because the lore team aren't trying. Consider this - in just two months, Tom Abernathy quit and made and abrasive tweet about how there's no such position as a narrative lead in Riot anymore, Opeli ran away to management and Kitae reportedly quit entirely. On top of that, the blog post that started it all reeks of being a marketing spin; I sincerely doubt it would so easily contradict established lore created by someone who is still on the development team if it wasn't.
Chances are, with Riot Games burning through money due to their eSports initiative, the narrative team was more or less repurposed into writing flavorful marketing events that help them sell more champions and skins. Plenty of them probably want to tell us more and plenty of them likely don't even want the reboot, but they're stuck dealing with the marketing department's attempts to make the lore more marketable at expense of world structure and champion identity. And that's likely on top of them lacking the resources and clearance to make large changes like figuring out geography that makes Noxus vs. Ionia war make sense, on top of also lacking clearance to talk about it.
Far as any of us can see, the narrative department is now a career dead end where people would only work because they really like the field. Yes, I can criticize them pretty brutally, but it must be painful to be stuck in the position where everything happens at a whim of some marketing exec who doesn't understand why these actions poison the well for all forms of community interaction.
Legacy of Xion5 votesTo be clear, I named the people I see most vehemently defending the old lore, and have always brought up good points. Cupcake Trap is passionate, you're a smartass but you've never, in my view, outright attacked Riot, and Terra Rising does his thing and brings up plenty of good points.
To touch on Abernathy and Opeli - both of them handled this entire fiasco, no, this entire disaster horrifically, from Abernathy's lead of this and it's unveiling to Opeli's rudeness and terrible joke interjections. I wasn't around with kitae though, but I digress. The point is, that both of the extremely noticeable people who led the Great Retcon have left the lore team - which means a few things.
1.) it shows they had no idea what they were doing. Opeli entered a warzone armed with a Big Lebowski script and pretty words. Abernathy...besides him confirming the retconning of the Summoners and the Institute, I saw little to nothing from him. They unveil this and then...proceed to handle it with all the care of a blind man playing Jenga.
2.) It shows that, Opeli at least, can't take the heat. I can at least give her props for taking the quiet route and leaving the Narrative Team with some dignity. I don't hate her, but I found her handling of the situation unprofessional and disrespectful.
3.) They didn't think this through. At all. They retcon things that made the world unique and interesting - and give us nothing.
You guys (and others like us) might not have been the nicest, but in the end, dammit, we've been better than the assholes on Twitter threatening to rape Opeli, demanding her to be fired.
We're better than that, and us lore fans deserve more then two short stories and the empty promises of more.
Diahane2 votesAs a fan of the old Lore, I am disappointed by the approach to the new Lore, but I'm also disappointed by the community reaction. We lost a lot of good posters because they tried to show support for the retcon, which I'm not a fan of, but the reaction was just visceral as all hell.
Not to mention at least two Lore team members quit immediately afterwards. It's just a mess all around. A large amount of the really terrible shit that got said was from GD or random trolls who saw the chance to attack the Reds in a bad spot.
I really miss the Forums. I don't see the point in boards, just seem like a needlessly complex Reddit clone.
I'm hoping we can achieve a kind of equilibrium between Narrative's vision for the new Lore and what was so great about the old Lore. I think the peak status of the Lore, both in storytelling and community, was around 2011-2012, when the JoJ was still going strong, Kalamanda was really interesting, and we had a lot of fun discussions on the Lore Discussion boards.
No! Don't take the boards away! D= You're from NA, so you might not know, but the forums just meant that people from EUW had to either create a second account on NA and level it enough to post with 200+ms of ping or just forfeit the idea of ever having any possible meaningful interaction with the developers. I had a poor connection since really recently and I couldn't hope to play on NA to be able to post on the NA forums, so the boards just came as true salvation and a beacon of hope for me D= We EUW people are still limited in interaction by time zones, but trust me, the possibility of actually getting any attention or discussion going with someone involved in the development of content is no little thing, at least for me. Even if it means that sometimes I just have to post at the shittiest hours >> xD
Shokah7 votesI've been playing since the start of season 1 when Xin Zhao dropped (yes, that was a horrible week to start). I have read all the JoJ's, I read every champion bio & judgement - I don't feel alienated more than I feel confused I have yet to see any GAIN from the retcon. I'm not against alternate storylines, reboots, parallel universes or any other fictional handwaving that lets people start fresh.
My issue the MAIN issue for me with retcon is - why did they handle it so poorly? Why are they writing all this stuff now to 'catch' up? Internally they have known about removal of the league for a while, the new champs stopped getting Judgements, the IoW was no longer mentioned, the JoJ's been dead forever now... The website not working as a link - really? That feels like full on BS (I worked in IT for 10+ years, I don't care what databases or issues there are, there is always a work around.)
This is the biggest change for the story of the game since launch and they handled it so poorly it's horrifying.
If they wanted to avoid 90% of the complaints there should have been stuff ready to go for everyone on 'launch' - or if not on launch at least ready to go on a schedule like every 2 weeks - new chunk of bios. If there's no 'event' we should still be seeing roll-outs. This limbo of 'the lore is the same, but it's not' is garbage.
Sure I hate the changes that happened to Xerath, Trundle, Karma, Soraka, Sivir (who else?) because it made them into less interesting, more boring characters, IMO (I want DEEPER, RICHER, more complex histories) - but if it wasn't piecemeal'd out it would be easier to find solace in the good parts.
Their desire to move to some format that isn't JoJ like - so a new media (video, art, whatever) but they don't handle all of that, since the departments are broken up into teams. Non-text lore doesn't deliver in the same manner as a written story, sorry that's how it works. Movies are always more superficial than the books they are based on.
Yes, the Sion relaunch was good, but notice that was basically old-school. 4 pages, TEXT.
If the story has to wait 6+ months due to internal dept wrangling (Art, IT, Story + Champion launch) then it needs to be a massive dump of info when it does happen. Instead we get our 'events' which are basically a champion release + a pile of retcons AND still there is no delivery on previous content.
They launch a devblog, where's the updates? If it was only Tommy's thing, take it down.
Folks complaining about Narrative being scared of getting blazed on the boards - well, you get paid Riot bros. That's part of any work - the good and the bad. Yes, you signed on for it - You work on the public face side of Riot - the story, the art and how it translates into what people play.
Now I'm aware that many folks are like 'whoa Shokah, hold up they just started all this stuff like 3 months ago' and my response is 'Then they shouldn't have launched their new lore project til it was like at least 50 to 75% ready to roll.' All champions, all 'new' locations - everything. There's plenty of time til season 5 launches, why did they not take that time to get more done?
To do less feels like an insult to players (all players!) that spend hours of their lives making things (crafts, videos, statues, artwork) and playing LoL.
On a separate note: As a lore fan in ANY game, Riot/Leagues removal of it from the client (old JoJ button, lore buttons) is a kick in the balls period, because it says 'you aren't important enough for a BUTTON'. I can get all the e-sports I want, but god help me if I want to read a full page bio.
If anything is ALIENATING me it's that. I don't have to like the new direction, I don't have to like where the story is or is going, but it's annoying to not have a delivery system IN place that works for whatever format they are going to use.
UPfreely6 votesto me it just lacks that special connection it used to have. Now its just a generic story that i have no interest in reading.
Terra Booma5 votesI know I come across a bit rude in threads sometimes, so I try to curb that as of late. The problem I have is that Riot's tended to use more or less the exact same phrase.
"Good lore is coming, trust us."
or something else like.
"We're exploring new and advantageous ways of story telling."
Honestly my biggest problem with the retcon was essentially them telling us the same thing, and then taking away everything we still had.
The real problem is I've only been playing for just over a year (Well more like 1 and 3/4) and I've gotten frustrated with it, I can't imagine how the old timer lore fans must feel
Legacy of Xion5 votesThat's the exact problem, Terra.
They make all these promises. All these concepts and ideas are around, yet they only promise more. More more more.
It's been months since Abernathy's blog. A tech issue like that doesn't take months. There are plenty of hot fixes. Separate databases, just giving us the full lores for now. But no. No, short ass shitty lores that gut Ezreal, Skarner, and more.
And old timer lores probably are pulling their hair out.
Terra Booma2 votesThat's the exact problem, Terra.
They make all these promises. All these concepts and ideas are around, yet they only promise more. More more more.
It's been months since Abernathy's blog. A tech issue like that doesn't take months. There are plenty of hot fixes. Separate databases, just giving us the full lores for now. But no. No, short ass shitty lores that gut Ezreal, Skarner, and more.
And old timer lores probably are pulling their hair out.
I've more or less stopped worrying at this point thanks to factions.
Sorry to whoever at Riot is reading this, but a 3rd party site has more rights to the lore of this game then you do.
Kldran5 votesI REALLY miss the old Soraka. She went from self-made god to gullible child. In the original story I read back when I first started playing, she had the intelligence and strength to become a god, and the passion and emotion to lose patience with the role, when it forced her to stay her hand. She was someone I wished I could be. Then she got turned into some gullible naive child, that I'm glad to not be. After that, I completely lost interest in League Lore.
UncensoredAngel3 votesAgreed the sharima champs lores aren't even finished
Gross3 votesI am optimistic that they have something pretty big planned. Why would they retcon SO MUCH LORE if they don't have something planned up to replace it.
What's sad though is that the lore as of now, is broken. It's shattered, and a lot of champions and events suffer because of the retcon, and we are in a '' placeholder '' type of situation, which is not good at all.
GenoXx3 votesI was a fan of the lore. When I first looked at lol, I wasn't interested, until I looked at the lore. And especially the Joj series. That was like a blitzcrank pull. But fro some reason it never got updated. Then It disappeared. Then I turned my attention to the forums. Theories sounded interesting. After spending some time in the Lore discussion, felt like I was content. Until, I researched more their lore. Apparently the Joj was removed early this yr, when I started playing.
That's when I realized how lol lore was falling. Then that day with that dev blog came. At such a disappointment leagues lore has come to. Nowadays Lore is no longer a priority of League like it was when it first started. They got indulge in gameplay more than the lore. And it's only because their player base grew. That's when they decided to come up with e-sports(only League of Legends) And that killed any thought of Updated lore. That's why the lore team was silent for two yrs. I strongly believe that they ddnt really have a lore team at that time. I heard kitae moved elsewhere in the company. Maybe the same thing happened.
And then only lore you got was from new champions(Who wrote those) And this is new to me that some people quit after the dev blog. Narrative should have made better choices. Like ACTUALLY listening to the community and communicating Before making any critical changes to the lore. This is why I think that they did not consider lore an importance around the time. But now they have over a thousand complaints. You apparently don't know who to hire if they quit after their first constructive criticism.
All this is most likely why Riot may have alienated any vets on lore. They did not consider them an importance. And you can't devalue fans, or stuff like this happens
Xulsigae2 votesI wonder if Narrative had treated the lore changes as more akin to PBE or Preseason changes, subject to being tweaked based on player feedback, then things would have been much smoother and less rage inducing.
dialMARK4acti0n2 votesWhat have they written besides the Sion re-write since the retcon? The amazing, longer than usual, Xerath and Azir lore entries? I thought those were awesome, but beyond that, nothing else comes to mind in post-retcon lore.
Up until now, I have not been disappointed, I'm open to the new ideas. This coming from a huge lore fan!! Old and new!
Solidair32 votesI'm a fan of the old lore, but I'm also a fan of the promise for the future. Multiple lore installments for every champ? Progression? I'm in!
They're not quite there yet, but I am hopeful for the future.
GrandMa5TR1 votesWell I manage to read all the comment's. If we are willing to do that I'm sure we are willing to read the actual lore. About the same size.
