League of Legends retires Dominion game mode

League of Legends is a game that you either hate, or you love, but still hate sometimes. Personally, I put the game down years ago and never looked back. There are plenty of reasons for it, including the fact that matches that you hoped would end with a quick surrender would always drag out way longer than you'd hoped. And when you've got time for a long match, they surrender in 20. Of course, if you wanted to ensure that you had a fairly quick match, you could always play a match of Dominion.

Dominion was an interesting mode that had players starting out at level three, with both gold and XP coming in at an increased rate. This would often lead to quicker matches, as everyone would be at their full potential in short order. Unfortunately, not a lot of people actually played this mode. In fact, Riot just recently revealed that fewer than 0.5% of players actively play it. They even acknowledged that a portion of that half percent were probably bots.

So what do you do when you have a game mode that constantly needs tweaked and balanced, that no one really plays? Unfortunately for the few people who enjoyed it, the Riot team has decided that they can't justify maintaining Dominion any longer. They will be retiring the game mode permanently, as of February 22nd.

There is good news for those who were fans of the game mode, however. If you've been a dedicated Dominion player, then you'll be getting a special reward from the team at Riot. Players who have won more than 100 in matchmade Dominion games will be getting an exclusive Summoner Icon. They've promised that they will never reproduce it again, so you'll be one of the elite few with it. There's no cheating the system though, Co-op vs AI matches won't count toward the 100 victories, so you'll need to have matched up against live people.

Source: Riot