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Why didn't we play Dominion?

Togekiss24·2/19/2016, 1:15:37 AM·2 votes·914 views

So Riot announced a few days ago that Dominion is getting deleted from the game. Almost unsurprisingly, the core reasons they pointed out was just a lack of a playerbase and its burden of maintenance.

This is somewhat legitimate. When you are a company who is constantly trying to come up with new ideas to stay relevant to players, why waste your efforts on keeping alive something that's already dead? However, as I read the announcement, I noticed that absolutely no one really tried to point out the question that actually matters in a situation like this: Why are players NOT playing Dominion?

I wouldn't call "long queue times" and disappointing matchups a good excuse, because not only does that have the potential to happen in any other game mode, even Rift, those problems only come up as a symptom of a larger issue. What got players to stop playing Dominion in the first place?

What was it about Dominion's game mechanics that discouraged people from playing it?

Did players have any incentive to play Dominion over the other three game modes that exist? What purpose did it serve among those main game modes?

These are the real questions we should be trying to address. Right now, I really feel like the move to remove the map is more of a cop-out decision than anything else. I personally always loved the game mode, as it provided me an option to choose between the more methodical main map, to a quicker, fast-paced game with different playing rules. Even ARAM kind of fails to be as exhilarating and time-constraint friendly as Dominion, so it's sad to see it go.

What are your thoughts, community?

19 Comments

David Haller2/19/2016, 1:42:15 AM2 votes

I'm going to go with...

The same reason Summoner's Rift is the most popular game mode.

You cannot become a professional League player through Dominion.

There are no E-Sports events hosting "LCS Dominion 2016."

There wasn't even a ranked queue for Dominion.

What incentive do players have to play Dominion other than strictly for the fun of it?

Vexful2/19/2016, 1:20:43 AM1 votes

What was good: You could pick whatever you wanted and have fun Less hostile than normals

What was bad: Boring as fuck

Fusarix2/19/2016, 1:33:35 AM1 votes

Not saying it would make anything better. But if Riot put more balancing attention into dominion, and if a competitive scene was actually supported for this game mode -- and if a meta for it was developed, I bet a lot more people would have played it. For me it felt like it was just too easy to ignore. Ended up sitting in base way too long at the beginning for a --fast paced game mode-- ? I don't know exactly what it was taking away from the dominion experience, because there were too many flaws to keep it going. I agree with Riots statements, if they spent more time working on dominion -- summoners rift --THE ACTUAL GAME- would suffer as a result.

DrCyanide2/19/2016, 1:40:22 AM1 votes

What I disliked most of all was that I never felt like I was winning. You don't "win" a game of Dominion, you just lost slower than your opponent.

The other thing is Control Points just never seemed like a mode that was engaging from a top down view while controlling a single unit. Part of what makes Control Points interesting in other games is that your view is much more limited, and the range that enemies can counter your capture is typically much further. A sniper can kill you from out of sight, ending your capture in a FPS. In League, there's a much smaller chance that a player will be able to get in range to stop you without you noticing before hand.

EcchiOtakuTM2/19/2016, 1:57:27 AM1 votes

Dominion had more strategy to it then beginners actually knew, but riot never explained some of the cool tricks you could do to win a game and comp was important so it stayed as an unbalanced game mode since they just let it randomly stay.

Not sure if removing it was the good choice but if it allows them to focus better on their core game (5v5s, aram) then so be it.

Also 3v3s isn't a game mode to me ever since they changed the map from a diverse map where all sorts of champs could play on to a small bruiser-focused map :/ where only certain top mages can play on.

Trídent2/19/2016, 2:03:30 AM1 votes

I played hide n seek a lot

Discus2/19/2016, 7:01:47 AM1 votes

People were too busy playing SR, and not enough people play Dominion. That leads to a legitimate meta not being fully developed, let alone publicized. So when people do decide to go into a Dominion game, they think all you do is kill people and run around and cap, while having no idea about a meta that helps dictate where people should be positioned when and where and what they should do in different scenarios, compared to how well developed SR is.

Rebonack2/19/2016, 7:13:28 AM1 votes

I've asked questions like these before. The answers I typically got were:

It feels like you don't win, you just don't lose.
No Ranked means nothing to strive for, no reason to improve.
Horribly balanced when it first came out, people abandoned it and didn't look back.
No competitive and no tutorial means players didn't have an easy way to learn proper strategy.
Non-intuitive map design (people's first impulse is to push toward Windmill) caused players to see it as largely pointless and without strategy.
Objectives are too same-y. Needs more variety to spice things up.

And of course, Riot did jack-shit to address these problems, save for a few balance changes over a year after the map came out.

Dominick Destine2/19/2016, 1:17:20 AM1 votes

... because it sucked?

There was barely any strategy beyond "Throw yourself at the enemy except if you're under a turret". It needed a huge amount of changes which it never got.... but most importantly; There was never a Ranked Dominion Queue.

Lovelle2/22/2016, 12:15:57 AM1 votes

As someone that came from 3v3 to play Dominion, I feel like I've gotten a lot better mechanics-wise with my champions of choice.

Back when I first started I would only feed and I couldn't land anything to save my life. The game was just so fast paced and I had a hard time keeping up with anything. Now I feel like I've improved a lot.

When the mode gets removed, I'll probably go back to 3v3, but I'll be a lot better than I was before thanks to Dominion. It's just a shame to see the map go, because once you get past all the entry level chaos, it's a really face-paced/objective oriented game mode that no other map in LoL really matches.

LoL just won't be the same for me anymore once Dominion is gone.