Talk:Bard/@comment-12049719-20150307032339/@comment-8100976-20150312134038

@Krufix

I hate to say it but the lore as it is now is primarily a marketing display. The intent is to make the character appealing, interesting, cool or powerful; this in turn drives sales with hype. Think about the sales model of League for a moment with a new character. You have to buy the character to play the character never knowing whether or not you will enjoy the character until you play said champion. Normally this is dealt with by 'free week' champions; you can try a champion for free maybe buy them if you like them. With new releases there is a moritorium for two weeks before the champion rotates into free week yet a big portion of the sales for that champion will be within the first two weeks. The lore as it exists helps to fuel this feeding frenzy of sales. Teasers, videos and art all promise you an experience and entice you to buy the product without playing the champion yourself. League isn't selling you a story, League is selling you the feeling of being powerful in a competitive environment.

They've hollowed out the lore to make things look and feel cool. They didn't want their champions to be constrained to a narrative structure because of the difficulty of working the underlying theme (there being a League and us being Summoners) into each Champion. It was a conscious decision to abadoned the old lore in favor of a more sales driven marketing approach; for better or worse. Riot will almost certainly never admit that I wouldn't expect them to, it's easy to perceive that as a cold decision or a breach of trust but they are ultimately a company and people like shiny new things.

I agree that lore is an objective thing that can make all games better, I just don't think League wants to be a game. It wants to be a sport. Sports are purely competitive environments often around team-work and victory where they're most commonly objective driven. Sounds a lot like League these days, doesn't it? I expect we will slowly see less and less true 'lore' in the sense of world building and relationships between characters and more flashy cinematics and lore peices where the viewer is permitted to draw their own conclusions about who the champion is so they can project themselves on the character easier. League is basically trying to beat the clock and ingraine itself into the cultural fabric of society, to reach the acceptance of a sport while having a unique monopoly. Imagine that everyone had to a buy a ball, from you; that everyone had to play on the field that you own; that you could sell shiny new balls or balls with new skins that people would buy cause they're new or play differently. It sounds almost Machiavellian when I put it like that but it's certainly a reasonable point of landing considering their speed and direction.