After five years, Riot Games is shutting down<\/a>\u00a0one of its most controversial game modes.<\/p>
Dominion, a capture-and-hold style game mode revealed in August 2011, provided a different take on League of Legends<\/a><\/em>\u2014forsaking the laning style of play favored on the Summoner’s Rift and Twisted Treeline. Set on a new map called the Crystal Scar, two teams of five players battled to control five different control points located evenly around the circular map. Controlling those points deals damage over time to the enemy nexus, meaning the team that maintains control longest eventually wins the game. It offered players a unique take on League<\/em>\u00a0gameplay.<\/p>
In November 2014, Riot Games lead designer Greg \u201cGhostcrawler\u201d Street emphatically stated<\/a> that \u201cDominion isn\u2019t going anywhere,\u201d despite a small population that makes it difficult to implement solid matchmaking. Apparently, over the last year and a half, the company\u2019s thinking has changed. The challenge of doing separate balance and support for a game with a shrinking base that leads to poor matchmaking became too much, and put the company in a pickle\u2014Dominion can\u2019t survive without more support, but spending more effort on support for it is in some ways wasted effort, due to the small number of players.<\/p>
Of course, 0.5 percent of 27 million daily players<\/a> is still 135,000 people, an audience that would rank as the No. 3 game on Steam<\/a> on any given day, behind Counter-Strike<\/em> and Dota 2<\/em>. Plenty of developers provide ongoing support for audiences of smaller scale. But Riot Games wants to focus on other products instead of continuing an ongoing battle<\/a>\u00a0that it doesn’t think it can win.<\/p>
Photo via Riot Games<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
