A Summoner has disconnected!
This is a bittersweet message. The thing that we’ve been waiting to announce (and why there haven’t been any new chapters recently) is that Rise is moving off WuxiaWorld and onto it’s own site.
We’ve been working pretty hard over the past few months to get everything squared away on the new site (https://risetheNovelFire.net) to make sure that it offers just as good of a reading experience as what we have currently on WuxiaWorld. All of the old chapters are up there and we’ve pretty much fixed everything related to the reading experience. There are still things that need to be worked on (like the front page) and the rest of the site as a whole. But the chapters are up, we can upload new chapters to the site, and you guys should be able to read them with no issues.
Now let’s get into the reasons why we’re moving. Trust us, this wasn’t an easy decision to make. We’ve been translating webnovels since way before the scene exploded, and we’ve always been on WuxiaWorld. Ideally, we’d probably stay here too. But Rise is a complicated novel in terms of its legality, something we hadn’t fully considered when first licensed the story for us. The problem is that the translation uses IP that comes from League of Legends, including character names, map names, mechanics, attack skills, and pretty much everything that isn’t specific to Rise. We also use trademarked branding for professional leagues like the LPL, the Korean championship circuit, and the channels that broadcast them. That stuff we do not have a license for at all. But some of those, we don’t need a license for in order to write about. Like you can write a novel or a fanfic about the NFL/NBA/NHL without getting a license for that. No one cares because it’s considered to be a part of “common culture”.
The League of Legends IP though, that’s not exactly common culture. Saying “Oh, they’re going to a cybercafe to play League of Legends” counts as common culture. Because the game is well-known in popular culture. But talking about Yasuo or Lucian or Zed, describing their attack animations and the names of their skills, that’s not common culture anymore. Riot does allow for people to use their IP as part of what they refer to as “community projects” without a license. But there are terms involved with that – one of which is that it cannot involve anything that ‘involves a business or legal entity”, which certainly is.
Then there are other issues/clauses, such as a requirement that Riot Games (the publisher of the League of Legends game) must be granted permission to “use, copy, modify, distribute, and make derivative works of your Project in any form, on a royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide basis, for any purpose” – which simply cannot grant, based on the terms of its own license with the Rise Chinese publisher.