Boards›Esports

Dominion should be an eSport

Kholdstare13·3/17/2015, 3:09:05 PM·5 votes·839 views

If you've never sat down and watched high level Dominion gameplay, you're missing out.

And that's the problem. Riot never fully embraced Dominion as a spectator sport, leading too many people to miss out way back when the core strategy and meta first emerged. With dwindling population and no real exposure for the top end players, it was hard to interest new players in the mode when all they could see were other complete novices with no clue how to play. It only got worse when bots swarmed into the entry level queue.

But despite all of this, Dominion is still a deep and exciting mode, and a much grander spectacle to observe in action than any other MOBA out there. I encourage everyone to watch a tournament level match and see for yourselves.

I'm not sure what the current tournament scene is like. I think I heard that EUW has a fairly active regular tournament. If Sylian or anyone else knows where to find and watch these matches, please let me know and I can post a link here. If there are any old DD VoDs available and anyone can point me to them, I'll post that link too.

Back to the main point: Riot should embrace the opportunity for exposure, and incorporate a Dominion circuit into their LCS eSports scene. It takes a very different kind of play to succeed at Dominion, and a very different (and difficult) shoutcasting to stay on top of all the action while keeping the audience properly aware of what is going on. Still, once competitors and casters are trained and ready, Dominion becomes the most exciting MOBA you could watch. It's fast. The action comes quickly, and doesn't stop for anything. This isn't SR, where you start out able to relax for the first 20 minutes, clicking around and waiting for someone to try and start something, and getting a breather later on after each teamfight while the winners push. That first 20 minutes is the entire game, and there is never a time when nothing important is going on. Sets would contain a larger number of games, due to the length, and really give a chance to see teams reacting to one another, adapting their composition and strategy around their opponents.

Viewers would quickly learn from watching, and be able to improve their own play as well. If this were to rekindle interest in the mode and in enabling ranked, well, that's a bonus. What I mostly want is to expand LoL eSports with a different brand of action. One I can be excited to watch. If you've ever seen it, I'm sure you will agree.

Make Dominion an official part of League of Legends eSports.

5 Comments

KatanaNoTatsujin3/17/2015, 7:57:49 PM1 votes

Hell yeah i love dominion it just sucks cause it takes forever to Que in nowadays.

EssXTee3/18/2015, 2:56:09 PM1 votes

Personally, I'm a fan of Dominion and have always wished it would be opened up for ranked play. And I feel that honestly any of LoL's gamemodes (including the temporary modes added from time to time) could have a shot at being successful in the eSports realm. Unfortunately I don't know that any of that will happen soon just due to the investment(s) that would likely be necessary.

Riot does frequently update the game, but most updates are focused on Summoner's Rift and how champions are balanced within that mode specifically. Not that Dominion is wildly unbalanced or in need of major work, but there isn't nearly as much work put into it.

But either way, I do think the first step to getting Dominion its own LCS and eSports following would be to implement a ranked system for it as well. If Riot decided to do this, it would only be a matter of time before it was ready to enter the eSports scene.

VoodooSaviorNBK3/21/2015, 11:36:37 AM1 votes

It'll legitimately never happen. I consider it to take less skill, significantly. Maybe I'm wrong. One thing though that dominion certainly has going for it is it's different, different champions are viable, and I think the league competitive scene is really stagnant and boring.

So dominion has a lot going for it compared to SR on that front, It's more interesting. At least it is to me. I think though, with the passivity of SR early on it makes the action more valuable, because there's less of it. On dominion, because there's so much action there's action inflation! It loses it's value.