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On Dominion's Removal

Trylobyte·2/11/2016, 5:30:13 PM·4 votes·709 views

I'm going to get downvoted so hard for this, but...

I've been playing League since before Dominion came out. I was there when it launched, a brand new exciting gamemode with different mechanics, new styles of play, all the shiny bells and whistles. It was the latest, the greatest thing. Riot promoted it heavily and supported it on par with Summoner's Rift. And it was popular and well-liked.

For about a month.

Riot stopped supporting Dominion because a very large part of the playerbase abandoned it, not the other way around. It didn't make sense to devote the level of time and attention that Dominion required when it had a tiny fraction of the players that SR did and couldn't even muster up numbers near what Twisted Treeline or ARAM have while it was being promoted. Even with a large number of bot accounts inflating those numbers. It's always sad to see a gamemode go, but this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The only thing surprising me about this decision is why it didn't happen years ago when it was clear that Dominion was never going to be popular enough to warrant the support it needed.

There will be a lot of angry threads, a lot of protests raised, but a lot of those will not be from people who played Dominion as a game mode regularly. They will be from people who played the game mode once or twice, consider themselves 'a Dominion player' because of it, and are simply looking for reasons to hate on Riot. Were Riot to go back on their decision now and leave Dominion in, it would not get any more popular - Many of those who protested its removal wouldn't play it because they never played it anyway and won't start now. Even if they updated it, fixed it, made it better. Us veterans, we've been down this road before and we know where it leads.

I feel sorry for those who did legitimately play and enjoy the game mode as well as for those who used the map in creative ways, such as for 'hide and seek' custom games. RIP Dominion. You will be missed, but we didn't need Clairvoyance to see this coming.

9 Comments

TNHA Baritone2/11/2016, 5:33:28 PM1 votes

I agree whole-heartedly.

Makior722/11/2016, 5:41:33 PM1 votes

I think they should keep dominion alive.... For one reason

The bots will move to the other game modes if dominion is taken away. And considering ive seen plenty of bots in the high lvl 20s riot doesnt seem to do a good job of automatically detecting them.

Basically by removing a map that no one plays anyway before riot has a good system in place to catch bots will simply cause more bots in summoners rift, twisted tree line, and aram most likely.

Erockandroll2/11/2016, 5:45:04 PM1 votes

Kinda insightful. I knew the lack of support for the game mode was in an infinite feedback loop. And yet it was the player base that tanked first.

Personally, I would look to Dominion from time to time, if I just needed a break from SR, or if I didn't have the time to commit to SR's game length. Though personally for me, the lack of a player base, was a bigger turnoff than Riot's support, as it simply made it harder to find a game. (The way I see it, popularity itself, is a feedback loop, affecting itself.) And that was competing against TT and ARAM.

The main thing for me, is that Dominion was actually interesting, in the sense that it is significantly different in the end all objective. (that being destroy the nexus) That's something they should not throw under the rug, and should probably implement in future featured game modes. (whether it's Dominion, Ascension, or something else.)

Weathered2/11/2016, 6:41:59 PM1 votes

Upvoted for summoner 13

Rebonack2/11/2016, 7:19:39 PM1 votes

For about a month.

Early Dominion was plagued by a lot of awful design choices, like that absolutely horrid back-cap item and the global resist nerf that made Bruisers way too strong. Many of these things were fixed, but they took months to years to resolve. And by the time Dominion was a mechanically healthy map, everyone had already moved on.

I've got nearly 4k games of Dominon played. 7K if I count all those AI games I played while my computer was a toaster and I didn't want to punish people by having someone with 10 FPS on their team. At this point, it's my hope that Riot tries several iterations of Dominion as featured modes. And maybe, hopefully, finds one that enough people enjoy to get the game back up to four permanent maps.