It doesn't take a genius to realize that out of all the game modes, dominion is pretty much never played. The only time that map is used really is for hide and seek in custom games.
Can we maybe spice up dominion a bit? Maybe Ultra Rapid Fire Dominion? Maybe change something about the game itself that makes it interesting?
Maybe change something about the game itself that makes it interesting?
Although Dominion could certainly use some TLC, the game mode already is interesting. The main problem are a continual lack of official support and a negative public perception. Overall, none of the alternate maps tend to get much in terms of balance changes or advertisement. They're also all looked down upon by the overall League playerbase, to various degrees. TT has ranked though, so it sorta has a niche. ARAM's randomness mitigates the stagnation, so the lack of changes isn't as immediately obvious.
Dominion, unfortunately, sits in an awkward place. As a competitive map, it has no ranked, no ladder, no rewards, or anything to incentivize player improvement. As a casual map, it has complex, nonobvious gameplay patterns and heavily suffers from neglect and stagnation. Competitive players have no reason to play the game mode; casual players have no reason to play the game mode. Love of the mode itself is pretty much the only reason to play Dominion.
Any attempts to revitalize the game mode have to address the current situation of being a competitive game mode forced into a casual setting. URF Dominion pushes it towards being fully casual (to the detriment of hardcore players). Ranked rewards pushes it towards being more competitive (to possible complaints from ranked SR). Either way, an official relaunch to reset playerbase perceptions while establishing a niche would do wonders for Dominion.
I'm with Wolferer on this one. What Dominion really needs is a relaunch that will make it more apparent to players that pushing the lanes is bad and controlling the jungle is good.
The 'simplest' (complete with finger quotes) solution would be to move the middle point from Windmill to Market. This would concentrate most of the action to the middle of the jungle which makes for more exciting lanes while at the same time giving bottom lane more of a chance to get in on the fun rather than being stuck down in a farming island.
This would also free up Windmill to be used as some kind of major neutral objective.
Dominion has a real uphill battle because it plays differently from every other permanent map. To win in SR you push lanes and kill towers. Same deal in TT and ARAM.
In Dominion, you can push lanes and cap towers, but that is super un-fun. That's because it makes you lose the game without much happening. The lane minions really don't help you capture the tower, and being in lane makes it super easy for the opponent to counter defend your movement. Meanwhile, the winning team merely has to defend while the losing team has to be aggressive, which is the reverse of every other game mode.
The way you actually win in Dominion is to control the jungle and make good map rotations. One of the things I see people complain most about Dominion is back-capping. This is a strategy that doesn't exist in other game modes, but is core to how Dominion works. The winning team has more points, thus has more objectives to defend, which gives the losing team an advantage to pressuring them.
I believe that Dominion has a major issue with attracting and keeping new players because of how different it is.
Riot needs to shake up the mode a little bit and put some serious thought into secondary objectives on the map. They need to push players towards the middle of the map, not towards the outside lanes like the minions currently do. There's a really great core gameplay in Dominion, but Riot really needs to spend time iterating on the map to make it appeal to more people.
I would love it if Rioters would discuss ideas with us. They're always so silent responding to ideas for Dominion.
I find that my issue with Dominion is that I have absolutely no clue as to how to play it and as a gamemode, it's extremely unintuitive.
With normal games, you can at least look up to the LCS, even for basic things like CSing, pinging, objective control. But Dominion? I feel useless every single game I've played of that mode because I have no clue what the hell I'm doing or what I'm supposed to be doing. I've never lost a bot game on SR, but of the 10 or so bot games I've played of dominion, I've won maybe 2 or 3 of them.
I think the 2 main issues of Dominion are that 1. there's no intuitive way to play the game. SR is intuitive - you go in 1 of the 3 lanes, kill minions, kill enemies, kill towers, kill the nexus. Dominion on the other hand is much more confusing - do you focus on killing champs? Do you focus on capturing turrets? Farming? Roaming? and 2. the gamemode itself feels rather dry and uninteresting. Dominion is all about out rotating the enemy team. You don't have the flashy dragon/baron steals the SR offers. You don't have the teamfights that SR offers. I don't even know who to pick for dominion. Waveclear? Tank? Is any stat prioritized in Dominion?
Dominion needs to become more intuitive, or have a tutorial of its own so that new players don't get turned away because of how at lost they feel when they first start playing the gamemode.
I actually enjoy dominion, the queue is just too damn long and there are too many people running bots.
