Among the many and constant questions Riot receives, one of the top among Dominion players is why there is no ranked mode for Dominion. As it turns out, Riot has all the backend implementation for ranked mode complete, they just aren’t ready to throw the switch. Why not? According to Brackhar back in September, Riot “want[ed] the map to have a chance to mature enough before we flip the switch.”

To be honest, this issue isn’t exactly close to my heart. I stopped playing Dominion quite a while back. It just wasn’t as gripping as I thought it would be. And ranked? Well, ranked doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really mean anything. Riot doesn’t compensate highly ranked players in any way for attaining their rank. The games are typically just as troll-saturated as any other ELO. It does give people something to shoot for, but since that’s directly related to winning or losing, and I think most people are trying to win, it has little effect on anything in the game other than player attitude, and that it affects negatively.

So really, I couldn’t care less if Riot waits to implement Ranked Dominion, although I have to admit, I’m confused why they would wait any longer. From my perspective, Dominion is already a dying gamemode. The Dominion forums have no-response posts (the best way to judge new post count that I could come up with) from yesterday morning on the front page. In general discussion I couldn’t find a no-response post older than 10 minutes. In the top 40 red posts on CL Gaming’s Redtracker, just 1 is about Dominion. My friend list never has more than 5 people playing Dominion, and when it reaches 5, most of them are playing with one another.

Waiting for Dominion to mature much further seems to me like waiting for a major league pitcher in his late thirties to mature: you’re running out of time before you just scrap the guy altogether. I’m not saying Riot should scrap Dominion – I know there are those among you that enjoy the game mode – rather that there is no reason to wait any longer on releasing ranked play for Dominion. If anything, it might get people who are sick of the ranked grind on Summoner’s Rift interested in the capture-and-hold playstyle.

This may seem like a foolish question to ask, but there’s a reason I ask. When Dominion first launched to beta I was playing the hell out of it. Part of my fascination was obviously the fact that we finally had something new in front of our faces to play with. The other part, which actually took a couple play sessions to recognize, was that I always had a full group of people to play with. It was never hard to find four other people who would get on voice chat and try a little capture and hold.

Just three days since the new mode launched, though, I’m already having trouble putting together a Dominion group and frankly, Dominion just isn’t that fun without a premade group. It can often be particularly unfun, even more so than Summoner’s Rift. So I’m bouncing back and forth a bit. I’m playing ranked games here and there with some friends in duo queue. I’m hitting Dominion when I have three or more friends ready to play.

What about you? Are you still playing Summoner’s Rift? Are you totally wrapped up in Dominion? Are you boycotting Dominion for some reason? Do you play Dominion with less than three people? Let me know in the comments.

With the release of Dominion and a backlog of videos for both Trundle and Veigar, I won’t be playing a Champ of the Week this week as I typically do on Summoner’s Rift.

In the interest of transparency, allow me to explain the Veigar/Trundle delay. Two weeks ago my hard drive started acting screwy. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but when I started to cut together the Veigar video, several of my clips became corrupted and wouldn’t work. After trying to recapture those clips, I realized the partition of my hard drive that housed my Fraps recordings was corrupt and needed wiped.

I now have a new hard drive up and running, a fresh Fraps install, but sadly, no clips. I’ve been using LoLReplay, which means going through quite a few games and capturing important moments without the benefit of a replay feature, which is time consuming.

The good news is that I should have time to work on both Veigar and Trundle tomorrow. I’m also planning a new feature specifically focused on Dominion, though I’m not totally sure where that one will fit.

Keep an eye on the YouTube channel for the newest videos as I have them. If you haven’t seen it, check out my Dominion commentary video for some tips and basic information on the latest game mode in League of Legends.

If you’ve queued up for a draft game in Dominion, you may have noticed that the game doesn’t dump team captains straight into the lobby. For instance, I queued up for a game this afternoon and went back into my match history to check some stats. The queue popped but I was still reading some stats so I clicked “Finish what I was doing.” When I was finally dropped into the lobby, I was the team captain, and with first ban I only had three seconds left to ban. In my confusion, I totally missed it.

In 5v5 and 3v3 draft modes you don’t see this happen because the client forces the captain to join the game immediately (and maybe everyone else – I’ll have to test it later). I made a post about the issue in the Dominion forums, to which Morello responded with the following:

Good catch – will raise visibility on this issue. Thanks!

If you see similar issues, I would highly recommend posting them to the Dominion forums. They’re much less cluttered than General Discussion and will probably see a flurry of Rioter activity today.

In a fairly quiet release, Riot has set Dominion live on its servers. That’s right, it’s live. On a Monday, no less. Unexpected? Absolutely. Even the unexpected I was expecting would have been Tuesday morning, so today was certainly a pleasant surprise.

If you’re looking for a way to spend your Monday, consider jumping into some games of Dominion. It’s a blast.