First of all, thank you for taking the time to do this. Communication about the overall direction of lore in League of legends has been sorely missed and is greatly appreciated. Now, on to the questions.
Are you going to try to find a new way to address the question of why new champions are joining the League of Legends? The last official word we have is that fans are expected to headcanon the reasons these champions join the League. Yes, we have backstory for the conflict between, say, Leona and Diana, or Kha'Zix and Rengar. What we don't have is context for why those rivalries are being expressed in the actual game we play.
On a related note, if it is now up to us to write our own headcanon for why champions are participating in the League, can you make a greater effort to create champions who can at least have an imaginably feasible reason for joining the League? Syndra, the mage whose core defining characteristic is that she will never again submit to the control of another, somehow decides to give total control of her body and unfettered access to her mind to a summoner. Kha'Zix, whose entire existence is explicitly for the purpose of killing and devouring the strong, somehow ends up in an environment where he cannot actually devour those he defeats (and according to his creator, he wasn't captured/imprisoned like Cho'gath). The new Warwick, who desperately needs to consume Soraka's heart before he loses himself utterly to madness, chooses to seek her out in a place where he will never be able to retrieve her heart when he defeats her. Not explicitly laying out why champions join the League in their bios is one thing, but if you want us to connect the dots ourselves, you have to at least meet us halfway and not write characters whose motivations seem to be fundamentally incompatible with being champions in the League of Legends.
That probably sounds harsher than I mean it to, and I am sympathetic to the difficulties the League as an entity presents for storytelling. The Institute of War exists to prevent big, sweeping conflicts. In fact, it exists to promote stasis. In lieu of large-scale military conflicts with huge consequences for life, land, and liberty of the characters we know, everything is played out in sterile proxy battles where no one is ever killed or permanently injured, and the most change we might expect to see as a result is the shifting of borders (ie: Noxus vs Ionia). Really, patriotism, personal glory, and imprisonment are just about the only compelling reasons someone could have to participate in the League as it stands. Revenge storylines have no teeth because of our meta-knowledge that Riot is never going to kill off a champion. That said, the current approach of trying to write around the League by pretending it doesn't exist doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy. If the lore is going to get more and more divorced from the gameplay, it's going to become less and less compelling ultimately.
Looking at the creative design AMAs, the most commonly asked questions are generally: "Why did this champion join the League?" and "How does this champion interact with other champions?". If you want your fans to have input on the direction of the lore, those are some questions we want to see answered. The League shouldn't be where a champion's story goes to die, it should be where their story goes to flourish.
If you take a look around the lore forums, there's a lot of frustration brewing, and I think the root of a fair bit of it is that we are pretty much getting less lore now than at any time in the history of League of Legends. League Judgments and the JoJ have been gone for a long time, and the champion release schedule has been relaxed from the previous pace of every two weeks, so we're getting less new champion lore per year as well. There are allegedly Big Things in the works, but "new sources of lore" is rapidly becoming the new "stealth rework". I know you can't give specific timelines, but are we going to see anything beyond more champion bios this year? Next year? The year after that?
