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Riot's resources and dominion

ModAzure Ole·2/12/2016, 3:52:03 PM·2 votes·491 views

Gonna dissent from popular opinion here, so feel free to downvote but:

It's not that Riot doesn't have the capacity to support dominion. We all know that they do, as they did it years ago, before they had the revenue they have today. There is the idea, however, of opportunity cost.

Dominion requires a few things to make it more desirable: a graphical update, balance, inclusion in lore, and hype (the way that urf and other rotated modes are hyped up). This means it needs attention from the map team, the balance team, the lore team, and the marketing team. Yes, Riot has all of these teams, but deploying them to dominion would make it impossible to meet the standard of maintenance and improvement on the Rift.

"But Gingerfap, they have so much money, you KNOW they could just hire a few more people"

Well, it's not that easy. Suppose they doubled the map team so that they could support both maps. Dominion gets updated, but ongoing upkeep isn't as important or intensive as summoner's rift and dominion serves a minority of players. Riot is now overstaffed and needs to let people go. Temp positions are poor treatments of people who could otherwise get a long term job.

Couple other issues I see with it, but here's a little food for thought.

5 Comments

The Poetic Zed2/12/2016, 3:53:45 PM2 votes

Actually I think this is the general consensus. The dominion player base is just too small to justify its upkeep costs.

davli2/12/2016, 4:03:11 PM2 votes

Would be nice to actually get a concrete number such as "players who have played Dominion at least once in the past week". I myself ONLY play Dominion, i have 1450 wins

Minarde2/13/2016, 3:57:32 AM1 votes

There's a few issues I have with your requirements for revitalizing Dominion.

Graphical Update I agree with you here. The Crystal Scar would need a major makeover to bring it up to par. As an aside, what is the Maps team working on right now? Map skins?

Balance Previously, balancing for all three alternate maps (TT, CS, HA) was essentially done by one guy. For perspective, SR's Balance team has at least eight people. Unless Riot's planning on substantially increasing resources for each alternate map, maintaining Dominion's balance really doesn't seem like much of a strain.

Inclusion in Lore How is this a requirement? Even SR isn't included in the lore nowadays.

Hype I highly doubt that taking some time away from the Community Collab stuff, podcasts, or the talk show thing to write a news post on Dominion occasionally would noticeably impact SR's quality. As for any stream/LCS broadcasts, I realize their schedule is typically hectic, but they manage to fit in the annual URF promotion. Doing one or two Dominion showmatches a year seems reasonable.