League of Legends’ ‘Dominion’ is being removed permanently

Riot Games has announced plans to retire Dominion, an alternative game mode in League of Legends.

For those unfamiliar with the mode — and judging by the lack of active players in it, that's probably a lot of you — Dominion is a capture-and-hold type mode emphasizing fast-paced skirmishes. The mode was played on an entirely new circular map, Crystal Scar, which featured five different Capture points. As you held these points, you would drain the enemy Nexus life.

The original idea behind Dominion was to innovate within the MOBA genre, offering players a quicker, more intense, combat-oriented match. By starting players at level 3 with more than 1300 gold, it effectively removed the boring "laning" phase, and focused more on the champion versus champion aspect. It also shortened the length of a match to 20-25 minutes, on average.

While it was a refreshing mode when it debuted years ago, it has since dropped in popularity. According to Riot, less than 0.5% of players actively play Dominion, and some of that includes bots.

"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)."

Riot now figures that alternative game modes, like Dominion, work better "in short cycles rather than as standalone queues."

"We’ve learned a lot from Dominion and the costs associated with maintaining a fully separate game mode with balance changes, bugfixes, and item updates," Riot said. "We’re considering other ways to use the Dominion map (as a featured game mode, for example) but nothing is set in stone. We’re retiring Dominion to focus on our vision for League moving forward: we’ll concentrate on the core League game while supporting alternative experiences which deliver consistent, competitive gameplay with healthy queues and appropriate matchmaking (ARAM and featured game modes are good examples of this)."

While some of you may be disappointed in Riot's decision to retire Dominion, the company does have a way to sort of make it up to you. They've taken a snapshot of the queue and will give out an "exclusive, never-to-be-produced" Summoner Icon to anyone with over 100 wins in matchmade Dominion games (not including Co-op vs. AI). If you meet this criteria, you can expect hte icon to arrive within the next two weeks.

Dominion will be permanently disabled and Crystal Scar will be removed from custom games on Monday, February 22.