Dominion has a low population because Riot purposefully neglected it. I remember playing during release last year in September/October and them saying "We'll take a bit for ranked to come out" and Dominion had a high population then. They never released ranked. Population dropped. Riot blames low population for lack of attention and features.

You have to show that you care about a mode to get people to play it. If Ranked had come out last year in November (like it was scheduled to) the population decline wouldn't have happened.

More people initially, but once they play a few games and see how terrible balance is, they'll quit again and further reinforce in their minds that Dominion is a joke.

I can make a rough estimate based on my play experience that any 3 players have a different idea of what 6 champs are "must bans" on Dominion. Didn't ban a champ that X player wanted banned? X player dodges. So what do you do, you implement a dodge penalty for these players. However, now you're penalizing these players for what they believe to be poor balancing. At this point they are likely to stop playing ranked altogether and go back to normals or play SR.

It was brought up a while ago that only about 5% of the Dominion population takes revive. Considering how Revive is akin to Flash on SR, I'm pretty sure it's safe to assume that most of Dominion's player base would either be indifferent or not care about ranked. To further reinforce this point, it's also a fact that only a small portion of the SR player base actually plays ranked. I don't think it would be unreasonable to apply the same reasoning to Dominion as well. So by adding ranked, you'll further divide a already small population. Most of the population would stick to normals.

However, with ranked, I'm 100% sure that the high elo/competitive population would increase. At the very least, I would expect the queues for high elo players to remain the same. For everyone else that's mid elo or lower, i.e the majority of the player base, adding ranked may all but kill Dominion for them.

Personally, I would not play ranked Dominion. The mode is simply too imbalanced.

I don't think that we can make this statement without evidence simply because the draft queue is so very, very dead.

I'm sure the majority of highly rated and seriously competitive players would be happy; but I think many of the casual players (myself included) prefer blind pick to draft, which is why the draft queue never got going in the first place.

Even if the queue times weren't an issue, I don't like waiting the extra 5+ minutes it takes for the pick/ban phase; that's an additional 15 to 25% of my gaming time sitting around not playing the damn game.

And I don't consider counter-picking to a valid argument in favor of draft. Sure, counterpicking is fun when you do it, but it sucks when it's done against you. Statistically, you're going to get counterpicked as often as you counterpick, it will ruin as many games at it makes.

Bans and ability to gauge your progress as measured by elo are, however, very good arguments ranked; good enough to probably make me try it as much as I hate both draft mode.

But me, and I'm sure plenty of other casual players that don't bother with the forum won't cry if ranked dominion never gets released.

Before you flame me, I believe getting ranked is almost certainly good for the game as a whole (even if I probably won't play it much) for a number reasons. Attract more serious players, trying to raise elo as a reward for sticking it out with the game mode; improving the competitive scene, statistic tracking, etc.

I'd just view ranked dominion with the same mix of indifference and [opposite of schadenfreude] as releasing new skins for a champion I don't plan on unlocking.

@bierfaust

I'm pretty sure there's more involved in Ranked Dom than you mentioned. Just two examples I can think of:

Go to your profile, and look at "Ranked Stats." They'd have to build a whole new set of stats for Dominion, which requires a lot of different departments outside of IT/Software. These would be things like QA, PR, etc... Would they include all of your champions played? Would your K/D/A factor in to your champion stats? Things like that. Dominion would skew the heck out of a lot of those stats, so they'd have to figure out whether they'd work around it, or make a whole new stat page for Dominion.

Look at the website integration of Ranked ladders - they'd have to build something for Dominion for that as well.

That's just two off the top of my head. It would take much longer than a couple weeks, I'd think, to enable this.

Yeah because even the new 3v3 map is super well balanced...

This is exactly why we need ranked. I don't want to play with people like you (no offense). I don't like mirror match ups, I don't like having to play safe with my picks all the time because I can't see who I'm up against, I don't like the inability to pick a counter to a strong pick on the other team, etc.

I hate blind pick, a lot. But I play it because I don't have a choice. If they made draft pick mandatory that would be fine by me, as a start at least. Visible ELO doesn't matter so much to me, I can usually gauge roughly where my ELO is hovering based on my opponents and what they choose. For example people that spam Jayce bot. I have, in the last 10 games or so, climbed out of that ELO. Now it's almost anybody bot, which is great because it makes things so much more interesting. But I do see Jax bot a lot more than anyone else atm and he does become a problem once he is farmed up.
But Ranked gives a reason to play serious, and to win. Actually let me reword that, it removes the excuse for people not to give 100%. Which is something that is currently killing the game mode atm, and does turn new people, and vets, away.

What people need to realise is that with bans, people can pick the champs they don't like fighting. Of course every ELO would have different bans. e.g. low ELO bans stealth champs like shaco and eve (because they refuse to learn how to counter them), slightly higher ELO would ban Yorick, Jayce etc. Im probably just above 1600 or so, and the biggest issue at this stage is Jax, Teemo, Zyra. (BFT if Im completely honest) So those would be my picks to ban.
Kassadin is just a global ban pretty much, so that's why I didn't mention him.

We're just 2 different people, with different tastes in gametype, and there's nothing wrong with that. But, there is something wrong when you deny 1 area of people something they need to enjoy the game so much more than they currently do.

Well to be perfectly honest, there wouldn't be that much involved. They have already coded everything, it would just be a matter of substituting "DOM" for"SR" in 99% of the titles in the forms and database records.

I'm not saying it's simple, but it's infinitely easier when you have done it once before, so you have encountered all the issues in the past and know how to resolve them, leading to a much quicker deployment/development 2nd time round.

As for the stats thing, well not really. They already lump TT and SR stats together. Why would DOM be any different. Ranked is ranked. Doesn't really matter what map you're playing. But yes, they could just have list to break down Champs played, kills, etc. for each map type inside the ranked stats page itself if they really wanted to. But I think that's unnecessary myself.

Yea, TT isn't balanced either but what's done is done.

None, taken; I'm not particularly keen on playing with who want to be super serious durring my down time, either. Let's not dual queue

I do want to repeat that I thought implementing ranked would be good for Dominion, particularly players like you. My only point is I'm not sure what the relative populations are of players like you is to players like me.

I fear the main reason we don't have Ranked Dominion is that the number of people who would enjoy it is small enough that it's difficult for Riot to justify the resources it would take to setup and maintain it.

Funny you mention population size. People don't play DOM or take it seriously because there is no ranked option, that is the primary reason aside from champion balance, that people lost interest in DOM. Having Ranked would definitely peek more interest and maybe even bring back those that initially left because of the lack of ranked. Hard to say exactly, but there is no doubt that it will increase the population. (I mean it's not going to cause the population to get any smaller)

Of course the biggest reason is champion balance, and some people just don't have the patience to learn a new map, new play style, new "tier list" of champions. And there is nothing you can do to change their minds about that because they just aren't interested. That's a dead horse and Riot need to leave that issue where it lies because you cannot change some people no matter how hard you think about it or what you decide to implement.