For Project L’s most devoted fans, “tomorrow” never seems to come

Being a day-one fan is an arduous task sometimes. Games, especially these days, take a while to blossom into the perfect experience they're meant to be. No Man's Sky, Warframe, and even Fortnite. Those early days can be rough. However, for those who attach themselves to a game before it even releases, the situation can be especially dire. For Project L's day zero fans, a stange tradition has emerged in the game's official Discord server.

"We have a Discord bot made by Tristan who is one of the moderators in the server. It records the days since the last time Riot Games has released information on Project L," writes moderator Shura to me in DMs. "Basically, as more time without news passed by, the word 'tomorrow' started to appear more often".

Looking back through the message history in the Project L discord server, you can find literally years' worth of copium and discussion. All the way back in November 2021 you see a prototype of the tomorrow tradition, with user Exael asking "is tomorrow the day" only to be shot down by a mysterious deleted user's one-word response: no. Months would pass before another official update would happen.

It wouldn't be until the end of 2022 that the tomorrow posting would start to manifest. Every day, someone would summon the bot to state how many days it had been since the last update, and every day someone would assure jokingly that the next update would be coming tomorrow. By early 2023, multiple users would keep this trend alive. Fast forward to today, and it's an ongoing joke embraced by all.

As for the originator, it's hard to pin down the culprit. Too much time has passed, and thanks to a large group of fans embracing it, the patient zero of this particular trend remains a mystery. Shura states. "I'm not really sure sadly, after seeing multiple members join in the joke it made it hard to keep track of who was the first."

Regardless of who started it, the result of this running joke is clear. A flock of early birds with one thing in common - a hunger for updates. This combined with the marketing strategy of rare, explosive updates on Project L's development has resulted in this peculiar practice.

Looking back through the Discord server, the longest number of days tracked since an update was 255 days between the initial reveal as part of the Arcane celebration, and the Illaoi development blog post. These are people who are used to waiting ages for crumbs of info - and have built a community around speculation and hope that an update is coming... tomorrow.