That is a blatant lie and you know it. Just when I thought you couldn't get any worst. I'm done with you. This debate is a waste of my time and this post is my final one.

You're a complete ass but I'm afraid you may be right. I think what an earlier summoner said rings true, I used to love the lore updates but now I dread them.

Also I forgot Kit was the one who told all the ME3 fans their opinions didn't matter. Some how I doubt her mind has changed while at Riot.

I am afraid this is what Eserine wants.

Do not believe him merely because what he says looks partly correct. I think everyone will agree, you should decide for yourself.

Eserine's argument is that Riot's lore team is worthless. If that is so, you should stop paying attention to them. Eserine is here to insult people. "Non-confrontational" is not a word that describes his behavior.

Everyone else in this forum still believes there is worth in Riot's lore. We can explain why and Eserine's insults can not convince us otherwise.

I'd like to quote Kitae, because good judgments are made off of real evidence, not insults. Remember that Riot Games is a collection of people. Anything that gets released and stays the same first has to get their approval.

Mass Effect 3. No gameplay discussion, let's look purely at story. Compare 2 to 3, which had better story telling elements? You may say that Mass Effect 3 was an end to the series, ergo how much more development can you have?

Fine.

How about looking at your options: Renegade and Paragon. I'd like to make specific examples, but for the sake of spoilers, I'll try to be a bit ambiguous about them. It doesn't matter if you're Paragon or Renegade, it really doesn't. It doesn't affect decisions on the larger scale, it doesn't affect your character per se really because you are still a hero. You are still Commander Shepard, the savior of the universe. You're space Jesus no matter what you do. And remember how it originally ended before the fans clamored for an actual ending to be implemented? Do I need to bring that up? Let's talk about characters then. Say you got in a relationship with Jack, what happens with her in ME 3? Is it really THAT big of a shock? Or let's say Legion was killed in 2 (through magical means that are not spoiled), what happens in ME 3 with him? Isn't that a huge copout and completely lazy writing to have HOLO LEGION KAY compared to having an actual consequence of letting him die? Should I get into the uselessness of having the Rachni or not having the Rachni? Gameplay wise, I love Legion and Garrus backing me up as I walk down the middle of the battlefield. Story wise, I wished he stayed dead and was gone and was dust. A thousand variables in a different ending my left butt cheek. Don't even get me started with how Fallout 3 promised 200 different endings and we got that instead.

You know what, that may be fine for some people, but I personally grew up with games like Fallout 1 and 2. How many endings did you have with that game, for choices you made? Even good choices could screw over people at the end.

Then there's Planescape Torment.

Planescape Torment is probably one of the best examples of a game with an amazing story and lore behind it, because your character develops due to YOUR actions which cannot be reversed. Like ME 3, though, the ending cannot change very much because of the cinematic. To get the second alternate cinematic you have to be creative and figure out how to kill you, an immortal, permanently. That's pretty intense. But even then, once you get all the niches and everything, you still get the subtle ending differences depending on which team mates you brought, which ones you cultivated relationships with, which ones you gave a **** about yet you still received the same ending cinematic.

That is because it is an incomplete game. That's the bottom line for a game like Planescape Torment, it was and is an incomplete game rushed out, and it still has some of the best narrative in a game I have seen. Layers upon layers, complexities, subtleties, humor, you name it its got it. So with Planescape Torment, a game 13 years old, you'd expect a rise in story telling. The ending of a book, of a movie, of anything, ANY form of entertainment can pontificate what it was telling, or sink it completely. The ending is probably one of, if not the absolute most important feature of a story. You could have a Pride and Prejudice story and the ending is the main character wears women's clothing and is shunned by everyone for no apparent reason. Or you can have a generally weak story, like a knight going on a quest to slay a dragon, but by having a strong ending such as the maiden being in love with the dragon and the knight goofed by killing him, you can create an interesting twist to a tired archetype.

Mass Effect 3 was fine with the ending it originally had, they believed THIS was enough to satisfy people for a 3 game long trilogy of you shooting aliens, saving the universe, talking to interesting races, making diplomatic connections, etc.

"We just want to release awesome stuff. Players please, give us a chance. Judge our games based on what they are. Judge the DLC based on what it is. Stop thinking you're a producer and telling us when and where we should be building our content."

That didn't work for fans. They judged. And having THAT ending, did not work for them, for the amount of hours and money we put into it. It wasn't sublime, it wasn't artistic, it was lazy. So please, do not use Mass Effect 3 as an example. You may bring this article up. How is it a piece of art when it feels rushed, it feels cheapened? How is it a piece of art when you have day one DLC and needs for extra beeps and boops to try and exemplify your view of it? But you know what, you're right. They made a trilogy, and they ended it there. Maybe the ending shouldn't have been ch-

Mass Effect 4.

Whoops. Doesn't matter. But maybe it won't have Shepard! Maybe it's just a game that takes place in the Mass Effect universe and the main character is YOU, and not Shepard! Why do I care? If they make four and show the effects of Shepard's choices, I am going to be upset because for the ending of a trilogy, that is what I would expect in terms of a story and an artistic piece. It makes its point and it shows you what your choices have done and how you benefited, or annihilated the galaxy. Oh wait is that an option even? I don't remember. Even if it is, how's that going to affect 4?

So with that long and maybe pointless speech because of this next point: LoL has no end. It really doesn't. There's no set plot for it, there's no "THIS IS WHERE IT WILL END STORY WISE BUT DON'T WORRY." It's really hard for that with this sort of game and with the sort of business plan Riot has, and that's understandable.

With that in mind, without any ending, that means how champions relate to one another and interact with one another because they're on the FoJ and their reasons for joining it *COUGH* SYNDRA *COUGH* are imperative to detailing what the characters are. You need to build up on that very strongly to have very strong characters and strong story telling potential.

You can have ambiguous characters like the mystical Karthus going "ooooo I'm a liiiich", that works. He's a lich. He has a hidden agenda as to why he joined, mystique and so forth. Rengar joined the League because...he wanted to be stronger...and to be able to fight Kha'Zix. And Kha'Zix decides to join the League out of pure coincidence, they see each other and give one another the stink eye "Oooo you doity rat!"

Syndra, honestly, is a good character concept with no real reason to join the League. Look at her quotes, look at how she speaks, she has an entire @#!$ing castle floating in the sky. How many champs can compete with "Hey I can levitate a castle and the terrain around it, I can crush you like a grape"? It brings in too many discrepancies. Changing the lore so it's even simpler is a terrible idea when there's no continual plot to LoL which the JoJ had perfectly and down pat. It characterized champs, it helped show development. It had Taric being fabulous, it had Nidalee's relationship, it had Irelia without her cold persona, it had Shaco questioned, it was able to accomplish its point. It was able to give us lore and a story to follow with intrigue and mystery.

But now it's our own canon to choose with as we please.

Let me ask everyone here one, simple thing: Why do the lore rewrites, instead of looking at the simple, basic, building block of the story, and start from there? Make new champions, new lore for them, and concentrate your efforts on simple things like the timeline, when champs joined, how old some champs are and so forth. Is everyone 30+ years old? That's how it currently is with the current timeline. Irelia is described as a young girl in the Ionian war and then a young woman when she joins the League. How many years had it been?

Why REWRITEREWRITEREWRITE instead of looking at things like the timeline? Annie's a 8 year old for who knows how long. Morgana was added into the League but was around before Kayle, the Ionian war lasted how long? How old are Garen and Katarina? Is Garen looking into buying a bigger carriage for his midlife crisis while Kat is going through menopause?

I made this with Ryugi and Ceru's help a while ago, it's probably outdated now but it helped serve my story's purpose:

Current year:------------21 CLE
Ionia v Noxus ReM:---20 CLE
Ionia v Noxus M:-------13 CLE
Ionian War: -------------11 CLE

This was/is the timeline for my story to help justify the ages of the champions and because 10 years is much more flexible than 15 years for writing. Riven was...let's say 17, 18; now she's 27, 28. Irelia was 14 when she led the battle of Placidum, was 16 when the first match happened, 23 when the Rematch happened and is now 24. Riven is still older, I always planned her to be but now it's not like Irelia is 30 and Riven is 31-39 years of age.

(Only slightly adjusted from my personal notes)

That's not the best timeline, it certainly isn't, but when I looked at it I couldn't believe their ages and I decided to go and rewrite it.

And if the question of "What happens to the earlier champions who joined the League" pops up? That's quite simple: Nothing. Make them join the League, later. Have different champs, like the scrapped champs such as Rob Blackblade be some of the early representatives. It's sort of tongue in cheek humor while adding to the fact that the League has pre-established champions that retired from the League when others came in. Why is that such a bad thing? To have retired champs, maybe one of them became the trainer for the Dauntless Vanguard or some **** like that, you can do a lot of things with such an idea.

Why focus on the rewrites when the basic building blocks of lore need to be looked at? If they honestly cared about lore, why go back to retouch the old champs instead of focusing on the current champs they are releasing? (Diana is an example of a current champ whose lore is of good, if not great quality.)

Rengar's lore is boring. Kha'Zix's lore is boring. The only reason they have any lore relevance is because they have one another. That's it. Outside of that, there's no reason for them to be in the League. Rengar, maybe? He got his butt kicked so he wants to be better, sooo maybe? But have any of you ever looked at the other Void champs? Cho'Gath was "captured", Kog was lured in by food, Kha'Zix is just like "SURE THIS IS A GOOD IDEA."

Is Eserine being a bit aggressive in his stance and perhaps rude at times? Perhaps. Hell he may say I'm an idiot after this, but that doesn't make his points less valid. If he was here with cookies and milk and sunshine and puppies, then his point wouldn't be made because people with loud voices going "NO YOU ARE WRONG" would easily crush his voice and he'd scuff his feet and go, "Okay..."

Is he incorrect in his way of thinking, with the quality of lore we've been receiving? I don't think so. With the evidence we have, with what we have seen, praying and hoping can only get you so far.

The IronStylus post I quoted is a great example. Players leave the thread thinking that their concerns are being acted upon by the company, but actually if you look more carefully at what IronStylus wrote he makes no commitments whatsoever, and very artfully framed his responses in terms of sympathetic agreement just as he did in tens of previous conversations on the same topic through the last year, and before him ricklessabandon. Players writing on this subject will be left to wait until someone within the company decides to act on their own initiative and willpower, and no amount of pleading, begging, lecturing, or complaining by players will ever change the course of the development cycle, despite any presented evidence or arguments someone might bring forward. It is much like talking to a wall:

->IronStylus claims that he "recognizes" that female limited shape diversity is a negative pattern (having "further reviewed" data independently)
->IronStylus mentions that many more females of limited shape diversity are incoming, and asks players not be mad at him
->IronStylus claims that Diana's design is "a pile of evidence" against the design pattern being complained about, but also admits that by all outward appearances Diana seems to exactly fit the same design pattern being complained about, and "probably" should be tweaked at some point
->IronStylus suggests that after ANOTHER YEAR there might be more shape diversity (if the champion designs get approved by popular vote by all the departments, if he doesn't "lose track of them" as he did with Sejuani being stripped of her armor, if the champion development team is even still in existence after another year when high-level Riot administrators have expressed interest publicly in plans to slow down or stop champion releases at a fixed numerical threshold).

This sort of vague assurance about player concerns happens surprisingly often. I've always felt bad for the Twisted Fate players who have kept a thread going constantly since 2010 asking for a Magnificent Twisted Fate rework, but of course we also have the topics of dead silence, like players asking for regional account transfers every day for two years, players asking for better racial representation in the game since its beginning, players asking for game features incorporated already into other MOBAs, players asking for obvious cases of game-hacking to be addressed with fixed exploits, players asking for better controls put upon the black market for account trading or boosting, players asking for MAC address bans on the most toxic ragers, players asking for openly gay characters in the lore pursuing romantic relationships as the straight characters do, players asking for Summoner's Rift map reskins, players asking for forum downvotes to stop closing serious threads they are attempting to host on game issues, players asking for better summoner name quality control since offensive names are still amazingly prevalent, and a number of other frequently visited topics that Riot posters will dance around if you ever try to ask them about it, much like our current lore problems with the reworks and new champions.

Before even being able to join the forums new Riot employees are required to take a "forum training course" which counsels them to adhere to the characteristically bizarre and unhelpful behavioral patterns players commonly see displayed, limited information disclosures lost in a blizzard of clutter, married with unconscionable lapses in feedback response.

It's an interesting contrast to the sort of posts President Tryndamere links to from the Harvard Business Review , which holds a somewhat different definition of a "transformational enterprise"

Surprisingly the protagonists of this article do not dodge taking ownership of a problem in order to effect successful changes like Merrill and Beck's employees do when they play the stalling/invisibility game with us.

I'm curious Dracorya, did you know that Riot Games has a grade of "F" from the Better Business Bureau of the USA? As you are done with this discussion I guess that we will never know...

Agreed, and unhappily she just secured a 3-6 year non-immigrant work visa

Scientists, engineers, and technologists. It's nice to know with so many Silicon Valley companies like Microsoft and Google being denied the personnel they need to develop green energy applications or computational resources due to the shortage of permits that Kitae's position is secured in providing Riot Games the competitive edge internationally. *Cough*

sleepyj101 seems capable of considering evidence independently ThorRush, he isn't arriving at his conclusions because I am brainwashing him somehow...

True, true, true, and true!

I think that what ThorRush means here is that "Everyone else in this forum not in the aforementioned school of thought still believes there is worth in Riot's lore", since obviously there are many players writing in that it is terrible.

As for the second sentence "We can explain why and Eserine's insults can not convince us otherwise.", the "explanation why" so far to seems to be blind faith in the lore department, which traditionally has not worked out well for the followers of many of history's cult leaders, con-men, soothsayers, and beauticians.

If you had actually taken time to read my comments instead of being lazy, you might have found that "the real evidence" that you cite (and claim I don't provide) was already referenced by me in a derogatory fashion, since it makes Kitae out to be an arrogant and imperialistic bombast. Do you know where sleepyj101 says:

He is talking about the same quote you just tried to use! I'm not claiming that the lore team doesn't review what they change, I'm claiming that what they change becomes ill-written garbage, riven from all sensible improvement by the bloated egos and narcissisms of a badly-implemented textual chop-shop.


I am not saying that you are an idiot, I agree with you completely.

Do you know what I wish was required reading before anyone was invited to this meeting?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8990JH20121010

This is what Riot problem-areas like the Lore Department could have been like had competent and resourceful people been placed in charge, not:

In any forum discussion with the current RIOT visual or story developers there is always an elephant in the room, namely the creative entitlement that the designer feels because

1. They have had X number of years in the industry working on other projects completely unrelated to Runeterra

2. The individual artist assumes incorrectly that they are the only one with mental access to each of the "awesome" past artistic influences that they have had, and this better informs their decision making than anyone in the gameplaying public in opinions on any subject relating to their field

3. Due to the tight release schedules little time is afforded to employees for side projects allowing them to feel that they are realizing what they dream of as their "full artistic potential" (stylistically photocopying the themes of their artistic heroes yet somehow becoming more rich and famous for it), so instead developers feel they have the right to use League of Legends for this, even when this might be at odds with game quality, player opinion, or modern/evolved cultural progress

As a result of this problem LoL's wider body of artwork is compared across the internet with BROM, a prolific niche fantasy artist in the painting community well-known for creating regressive images of elf women wearing leather bikinis and muscular barbarians bedecked in S&M-gear. Additionally the lore reads like Nancy Drew mysteries and Jeanne Betancourt. As a player do you have a problem with this? Too bad. Riot employees do not want to hear criticism of their projects, from each other, from an assortment of self-selecting-bias-prone customer focus groups that they put on the spot from time to time (the only ones who will show up are the ones who think Riot is 'the coolest'), from their own artistic consciences, or certainly from anyone on the internet attempting to bring forward problems to discuss with them.

The world-class developers at Amazon, on the other hand, have easily thought out a rational and obvious way to overcome GROUPTHINK to find effective and successful ideas in the mass-internet age, and it doesn't call for paying individual players $100 to visit their headquarters bit by bit within a single geopolitical region...

Grand Viper: A well-appreciated post.

Eserine: I think you have some good points, but you have an annoying tendency to jump to conclusions, often absurd ones or ones that appear incredibly condescending. You could at least phrase your criticisms in a way that doesn't turn off people, most of all any Reds outside the Lore department who would sympathize with you and give the thread attention, and avoid logical leaps that point in an accusatory direction.

Even if you don't get any Red posts, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you could probably make more people sympathetic to your cause by being nicer and less prone to "REPORT RIOT LORE DEPARTMENT FOR FEEDING, THEY DIDN'T DO THIS OR THIS SO THEREFORE THEY ARE TOTAL INCOMPETENT" posts.

The above statement is made on a heuristic basis, and is meant to help you make more effective critical evaluations of Riot's lore department. There's too much here to comment on.

On the other hand, I do think you have a bit more of a point than most people here seem to think you do, although I would agree that the condescension pretty much makes you look like a troll.

I find this comment baffling. Why, when presented with responses directly to the contrary, do you assume my motivations in making this thread are "making people sympathetic to my cause"? As you may have noticed, many players in this forum (perhaps including yourself) lack the attentional skills to even read or understand what I have written through this thread- and further, if I could convince them (perhaps with some sort of time-consuming cartoonish Youtube Video with lots of bright shiny lights and funny voices), nothing would change anyway because Riot does not listen to players who criticize them.

"Common sense" heuristic elements do not work within a system that doesn't function through common sense, such as when discussing the lore department's behaviors in regards to content or lack of player interaction. Instead rigorous evidence-based examination becomes necessary to justify claims in the face of complex and strange phenomena, as I would provide with any argument I have made that you feel is absurd or unwarranted, should you wish to be more specific than "there's too much to comment on".

Would I do this to win you over to my side of the argument so there is another person writing angry posts to the lore team about their bad performance and getting ignored like the hundreds of others of us? No. I would do this to mock your faulty reasoning and unfamiliarity with the patterns of the forums, because arguments defending the lore team's actions to this date are unjustified in terms of production (though not perhaps each of them having simultaneously, slowly and tragically dying grandmothers for the entirety of the past year, or parallel secret hard-drug rehabilitation clinic visits, or alternate crime-fighting personas, etc.), and therefore I and all others are correct in being dismissive of such positions put forward by sycophants, the demented, and the severely immature.

It's a brusque and blunt challenge to Hamilton's law, don't I understand that kindness and cooperation are the keys to human society's development and our ultimate survival? Not in situations where the specific society has decided to jump off of a cliff together.

tl;dr: I'm not here to "turn you on"

hmmm ... mmm, hmmm

This thread now has 1624 views, and no one seems to have any further comment or position on the issue beyond calling me "a meanie-head", therefore there doesn't seem to be much else to scream about.

If you readers would like to pointlessly hold hands and whistle Cumbayá into the abyss of mediocrity with Tortferngatr, here is the counterthread that was just created for that purpose.

Pursuant to my previous commitment in indicating when I was finished with a discussion, I Eserine, unlike the lore team, now signal that I will not be further participating in this thread (or indeed any part of the lore forum). If you would like to make up rude limericks about me in my permanent absence my name rhymes with "Dresser-bin" or "Mess-you're-in", and not "Quest-for-sheen".

I leave you all finally with this image of untalented lyrical graverobbers digging up the disgusted spirits of artistic forebears to rob them and rearrange their bodies of work in shallow unappreciation while promoting continued stupidity and incompetence in order to achieve fame without having any originality. Enjoy watching Riot work the short-hand shovel!