How Dominion Can Boost The LCS
The SR-only LCS fares ok from an eSports standpoint, but has one major problem. Nearly all of its viewing audience plays the game itself. It lacks the mass appeal to bring in a wider audience unfamiliar with the game, and to bring in new players to the game itself. I'm here to explain why adding a separate Dominion circuit (and possibly TT) to broadcast LCS streams, either as a separate season or intermixed with the SR season, is the best way to grab that wider audience and expand the appeal of the game as a whole.
The most important aspect for any game to be broadcast and hold an audience is readability. The audience needs to be able to follow what's going on without a deep knowledge of the game. It's the reason televised poker was never a popular thing until they invented the hole cam. That one little invention gave the audience a chance to see some inside knowledge of the players, allowed poker broadcasts to calculate odds of winning on the fly and create a display that allows the audience to judge the state of the game at a glance. It let them give the audience more info than the players themselves, despite having no poker knowledge. Having the info so readily available lets the casters talk more about interesting possibilities and to explain the game itself to newer viewers. They can know if a player is bluffing to comment on the strategy behind it, analyze the reasoning for betting at certain times, and otherwise explain things as they happen instead of needing to react afterwards. As opposed to older broadcasts where an in-depth knowledge of the game was required to really make sense of what was going on, adding that readable gamestate for the audience opened up a world of new possibilities and made the game accessible to a wide audience.
Dominion has that readability. There's a clearly displayed score of nexus health so you can see how close each team is to winning, point count is easily recognized so you can tell which team is currently scoring and when that changes, and all the depth to the game and how you actually go about playing it are irrelevant to the audience's enjoyment of the game. They can see clearly when a play is made. They don't need to know why any action was taken or what lead up to it, they can just focus on the results and the exciting action that happens to net those results. The biggest test for if a game can attract a wide audience is to simply turn it on and ask, "who's winning?" Dominion makes answering that easy.
With SR, you really need to play the game to have a clue what's going on, and even then the question of "who's winning" isn't clearly answered. "Well, these guys are up a couple kills, but team gold is roughly even and those guys' carry is a bit further into their build, but this team has a dragon up on the others, and that team has better ward coverage of the map right now, and these guys are a tower up overall, but those guys have pushed further in mid, and these guys have a late scaling champion that they can maybe get farmed and siege well later on...." You can see the problem. As an eSport, SR alone can never really hope to appeal beyond its playerbase as a target audience.
Dominion is the best way to attract a wider audience and bring them into the game as a whole. Adding Dominion to the LCS not only diversifies the type of action between SR's methodical tiptoe ballet around a snowball making sure to avoid giving up enough of a lead the enemy can use to get rolling and Dom's fast-paced rapid strategic action and nonstop thrills from start to finish, but also acts as a learning curve for the audience. They can start with Dominion, learn the champions and their abilities, learn about teamfights and how skills interact, all while watching a game that is easy and clear to understand and enjoy from the outside surface. Then, once they are more into it, they might look into other maps and see the other types of play that they offer. The thrill of Dominion might convince some to try the game out for themselves, especially if they have opinions tainted by DotA and need to see that a MOBA can be far more.
Overall, holding a broadcast Dominion season alongside the SR season would provide a huge boon to the LCS and LoL as a whole. It provides the appeal to attract a far wider viewership and get them interested in the game as a whole. Riot's SR-only focus and outright abusive neglect and lack of ranking (or solo ranking in the case of TT, majority of players don't have a team on hand) for other modes has lead Dominion to be widely underrated as far as gathering new players for the map, despite its massive list of merits. Broadcasting the highest levels of play not only serves to appeal to an outside audience, but to teach players about the mode itself, what proper strategy looks like, and how amazingly intense the mode can get. It can bring back the population Riot previously chased away and get the support needed for proper ranked play, while at the same time boosting the game as a whole to appeal to a far wider audience both in viewing and play.
