Riot Games is going through some growing pains as it expands. New IPs have come with their own hurdles, as demonstrated by Valorant‘s patch 1.11 rollback.
In addition to its new titles, Riot is still working to keep League of Legends, its original and primary cash cow, interesting and fun. League‘s most recent champion Seraphine has caused a huge stir, but unfortunately it was not in the good way. Many fans have not reacted positively to the character on a technical or story level, and an additional promotion for her that took the form of the character’s social media account didn’t help things.
At first, Seraphine’s social media presence seemed innocent enough, being a fictional influencer piloted by Riot games. A short story relating to Riot’s ongoing K/DA Comeback event played out over Seraphine’s Twitter, which saw “her” cover a K/DA song, get noticed by the group, and start recording with them. It was innocent enough until Seraphine began exhibiting signs of imposter syndrome, something that many players took issue with. Riot has promised to be more careful with Seraphine in the future, but it’s worth examining why this was an issue.
Many players took issue with Riot using a real mental health problem that many struggle with and using it for an advertisement campaign. The idea of the perpetually bubbly, pop-star from birth, fake persona of Seraphine asking for encouragement from people online annoyed many since the character wasn’t real and this was an attempt to get them to engage with a corporate mascot. It doesn’t help that many players already don’t like Seraphine’s lore due to its brevity compared to her K/DA storyline and a detail concerning a Hex stone that made Seraphine come off poorly.
That detail has since been retconned, but Seraphine’s lore still hasn’t been received well and her Twitter persona doesn’t feel genuine knowing that it’s part of a marketing promotion. For a character designed to draw attention to the K/DA event and everything that came with it, Seraphine kind of backfired. Add to that a recently found bug that gives Seraphine an unfair advantage, and it’s no wonder her Champion Spotlight is arguably the most disliked one so far.
It’s a shame too, because the intentions behind Seraphine were almost certainly good. Bethany Higa, who wrote Seraphine’s tweets, used her own experience with imposter syndrome to try and bring Seraphine to life. And the idea of a fictional character’s story playing out across a real-life social media outlet is not a bad idea for promotion or lore growth. Riot has gotten better at telling stories in interesting ways, so it’s a shame to see this endeavor fall apart.
League of Legends is available for PC.
Source: Polygon
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