I wanted to promote Dominion using montages.
I wanted to promote Dominion with montages a la what ssethtzeentach had made in the past. I had to start with a name, something I didn't think anyone would have thought of. Dominion? Why not, Dominiowned? Yeah, you can shoot me now.
I figured I'd start with a neat little Taric montage to show that he could be more of a supporty bruiser (although, the footage I used was pretty garbage due to experimenting with OBS settings, and showed nothing that I actually wanted to show, I did it more for shiggles because the match was hilariously imbalanced, which I enjoyed as I feel any montage creator would.) It didn't contain any real memes or anything, but I like to keep my editing in sync with whatever audio I used, which I thought more than made up for it. I had come across Mowtendoo's Pepsiman remix, and I couldn't resist. It seemed too perfect. The part that wasn't perfect was the frameskipping in the footage. I tried to mask it with as many earthquake and text effects as I could. All in all, it's been my crowning achievement so far in my time editing clips and syncing audio and video. You can see my progression on my channel. Dominiowned, Taric Edition
It wouldn't be but a few days later that I would hear the news that Dominion would be closing down for good. I didn't think you could go full tilt IRL, but I guess that did it. I closed league, and just kind of sat there, scrolling through YouTube and Facebook in a sort of trance. Dominion was my stomping ground and, at the time, I had exactly 500 wins. I considered just leaving it there, but there was something missing. I wanted my last Dominion win to be with a character I cherished. So I chose Swain. Swain had a lot of meaning to me, as he was the main of my mentor and bro back in Season 2, when I first started playing. For hours we sat on SR just laning because he wanted me to hone some skills in hopes of forming a ranked team, and always he was relentless, but I got better because of it. We never did end up forming a team, and he shortly quit after the start of Season 3, but at that point I had already sort of taken up his mantle. At the time we were actually a trio. Our third preferred to play Dominion over SR because after having played for several years as well, he got tired of being stuck in 40 minute matches with feeders before 15 minutes, so that's where our stomping ground became rooted. He still played on and off, the only time he really dropped the game was if he needed to reinstall it due to either a hard drive failure or a new computer he built, but at this point he's more or less quit as well. So, I'm left here with a series that's more or less DoA, and I figured I'd figure one last match with Swain. I managed to grab someone I met about a week before then on Dominion, and we duo queued. I locked in Swain. Picked the Tyrant skin in memoriam, and hit the record button on OBS. Tonight I threw the video into Vegas, and had to decide on a song.
I opted for The Call of Ktulu by Metallica, as its chord progressions and overall tone instill a feeling of dread, such that, despite winning a match that's an absolute stomp, it's meaningless in the end because the Crystal Scar will be wiped from existance. It's already been removed from Scarner's lore, after all. This time I didn't really want to do any intensive editing, and for a song that's almost 9 minutes long, fitting a 15 minute match into that is nigh impossible, so what I did was sync up the beginning, sped up the startup a little, threw a spaghetti image over me dropping spaghetti in chat, and let the first team fight start when the music really picks up. After that, I started cutting out any scenes that didn't have enemies in them, or any time I wasn't involved in a fight. I ran out of footage pretty damn quickly, so toward the end I just said screw it and let the rest of the video play, just lazily syncing the closing of the League client with the last chord in the song. TL;DR: I did a thing and then the thing that I wanted to do a thing for became kill and then I did a thing in memoriam and now I'm posting my sob story here.
I'm still not sure how to feel about it. More bitter than sweet when I consider everything that's happened since Dominion's release, like Riot bowing to their chinese overlords, but oh well.
This will probably be the only thread I make on the boards, and it'll likely be my last. It'll get no Red posts, and it'll probably be downvoted into oblivion because I supported a game mode that had a small but dedicated playerbase. I don't even care anymore. I just want the damn icon so I can change to it and never log in again. The only hope of me truly coming back dedicated to LoL would be if another fast-paced game mode that could handle similar balance changes as the Rift were introduced, but if Riot didn't want to support Dominion, no other game mode could.
I'll see you guys, most likely not on the Fields of Justice, though.
