Riot has announced today in a blog post that its capture based game made for League of Legends will be shutting down. Since its inception Dominion has been an unpopular game mode, and it never pulled in the numbers that Riot had hoped. It will be retired on Feburary 22nd, after which it will not longer be available in custom games either. According to Riot Fewer than 0.5% of League of Legends players regularly take part in Dominion, so it’s no real surprise that the mode is meeting its end.
The low number of players causes high queue times, and fouls up Riots matchmaking algorithm. Riot has concluded that secondary game modes work better in rotation, so Dominion may not be dead forever, but since its player numbers are so low I doubt we will see it back anytime soon.
The blog post explains “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.” So there you go, with the major in game updates to marksmen, the champion rebuilds, and the way that Riot continues to refresh their game every few months, its simply too much dev time to work on making sure that a champion is balanced for Dominion as well as Summoners Rift. The news is not all bad for Dominion players, as Riot have also announced that as a token gesture, anyone who has 100 ranked wins in Dominion before it’s shut down for good will receive a Summoner Icon never to be attainable again. So that’s quite nice, for those who spent days or weeks of their life in dominion.