A rebuttal to the community's response to Dominion's removal

I'm starting to wonder just how many people actually read the damn journal regarding Dominion's removal. I'm seeing a lot of comments where people are shoving words into Riot's mouth or just flat out making things up that they DIDN'T say in the journal.

• Riot is blaming the community for Dominion's unpopularity!

Lies. They even took responsibility for its neglect in the journal, explicitly.

> Unhealthy queues that force players to endure long waits with fluctuating match quality ultimately creates an overall poor experience -- one we take responsibility for.

• Riot claims they don't have the resources!

Again, lies. They said every time they have the resources to work on Dominion and improve it, they put it towards the Rift instead because they decided that's what should be the focal point of the League experience. Besides that, there's something in business known as a cost-benefit analysis. Whatever your thoughts on Riot are, they're still a business and still have to weigh how much an endeavor would cost, how that will enrich the experiences of people playing AND attract new customers, and if it's worth doing. In an alternate universe where Dominion became the big go-to game mode, the same would have applied to the Rift.

> We might have been able to break out of that downward spiral with more dedicated resources, but we chose Summoner’s Rift as the core League of Legends experience with its depth of gameplay, match pacing, and path to mastery. When it comes to the resources required to keep Dominion permanent and solve the inherent design problems and give it ongoing live balance support, we’ve consistently devoted them to Summoner’s Rift and related features because we felt they’d improve the overall League experience more.

> We haven’t been supporting Dominion, and we’ve trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle where the queue isn’t large enough to warrant major attention, but falls prey to bugs and periods of imbalance from the introduction of new champs and items (which then drives down the size of the queue, and so on).

• Dominion failed because they never activated ranked mode!

It was originally a plan, apparently, to have a ranked mode in Dominion, once the player base increased to an appropriate level and had a sizable pool of player skill. It never did.

> We haven’t been supporting Dominion, and we’ve trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle where the queue isn’t large enough to warrant major attention, but falls prey to bugs and periods of imbalance from the introduction of new champs and items (which then drives down the size of the queue, and so on).

> In the absence of our attention, matchmaking and game quality in Dominion varies wildly based on daily engagement. Because of how matchmaking works, the longer someone looking to play Dominion waits in queue, the wider the pool of potential foes the matchmaker can pull from -- with such a small population, Dominion games can match up widely divergent skill levels after long enough queue times.

• If they get rid of this, then why don't they delete champions/the other game maps?

Champions are a more implacable feature of the game than the game modes, and Dominion was a vastly different game mode from the Rift, Howling Abyss and Twisted Treeline. Twisted Treeline is basically Rift with only two lanes and minus the red and blue camps and dragon, and Howling Abyss is only the mid lane and random champions. Both apply to the Rift rules better than Dominion did. Champions are things you'll want to play AS, and it's easier to make a champion work with the mechanics of a game map than get such a divergent game map and mode to work evenly with the mechanics of a hundred thirty champions and counting, especially one that didn't receive much attention. Besides, you all complain that Riot's balancing in recent months sucks (which is a matter of opinion). You want them to divert more resources away from the Rift to try and make a divergent game mode work?! One that most of you didn't even play or give much thought about, anyways?

Ascension worked pretty well on the Dominion map because it was basically an arena without minions or objectives besides Xerath Ascendant and beating the snot out of one another, and the jungle in Dominion is practically its own level because it isn't divided up into four main linear quadrants like the Rift's jungle. The other game modes also worked well because they still worked off of the Rift mechanics while adding a twist to it. The best analogy I can think of is Dominion is Cricket, and the Rift is baseball. Both have very vastly different rules and don't work so well with one another, and it's a fool's errand to try and get them to work together. The new game modes that were added would be like adding rules for Multiball in baseball. It's a different game as a result, but it still functions off the rules of baseball.

• Riot's vision changed from four years ago!

Well, yeah. That kind of happens over time. Ideas change, concepts change. This is the natural development process, and when you have a game that constantly receives updates and new content, this is inevitable. Riot has matured tremendously since 2009, and they've had ample time to explore and experiment with their ability and responsibilities and transform from a small rookie development company to the billionaire powerhouse it is today. If they stayed the same since generation one, you wouldn't have the game it is today, and I mean that in every sense of the word. You'd still have shitty character models and crappy, outdated art. Want Sion to sound like a bad Ah-nold knockoff again? Want old Poppy back? How about the one hundred plus champions that have been added since, or the removal of dodge and the addition of the unique passive? Want to go back to a time when all skills scaled off AP, and ALL champions were noodle limbed with pizza feet?

Change happens, and Riot does their best to make it work as best as possible, and they have better experience and resources than we do. They have incentive to do it. They want you all to continue buying stuff from them, or else we can say bye bye to ALL of the League.