The critique in question:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Golly I don't think Riot is an awful company. In fact, I think it is one of the best that I've had the pleasure of interacting with. My biggest issue is the lack of support for your other modes. Summoner's Rift gets a lot of support, and with good reason. TT to a lesser extent, but it recently got a huge update. Dominion is for all extensive purposes dead, outside of DominateDominion.com weekly tournaments. I have been assured that Riot has not forgotten about Dominion, but from all outward appearances, it has been. What we really want is Riot to dedicate a week to implement ranked for Dominion. We want ranked. We've been asking for ranked every day since the inception of Dominion into the client. Literally. Every single day a new ranked thread is opened up on the Dominion forums. We've been told many official things regarding ranked. The mode needs growth, needs balance, it's ready to be implemented, it's not ready to be implemented. Unofficially I have been told that we as a community need to grow the mode. And we are doing all we can. We've made our own tournament environment, we have made in-game chats, we promote it ourselves through reddit and other social media. We have even developed a Mentor program, promoting new players into the mode. In all this, all we ask is for Riot to finally invest some time and make a ranked mode. It is not just the high end people who ask for it, it is everyone. People look at Dominion as the joke around mode, the goof off with new builds mode. They don't understand that there is actually a competitive scene because Riot hasn't promoted it outside of just making it and saying, "Ok, go!" Other summoners don't understand that Dominion is more than just the ARAM Riot equivalent. People of all skill-ranges want it. Newbies to the mode want to be able to look at high elo people and copy builds, look for vods, etc. We're tired of hearing the same thing. The mode has to grow. Well? What is Riot doing other than just saying "We haven't forgotten about the mode." What steps is Riot taking to grow the mode. We can't do it all ourselves, we've come as far as we can. It's time for Riot to step it up in this regard. Give us Ranked, promote the mode. That is what disappoints me most.

We got our token annual acknowledgement of existence. I didn't expect Morello to respond in depth with all the great changes they have planned and at least I felt I expressed my sentiments on the subject, so I'm happy.

Happy as in the the other sibling got $100 and I got $5 but at least I didn't get nothing sort of happy.

At this point, I don't care if we get ranked or not. Riot said they don't think the time is right for ranked. They said they want to let the community grow some more before they can implement ranked.

Okay, so, let's say that everyone who wants ranked is wrong and Riot is right and Ranked is not the solution and growing the community is...so what the hell is Riot's plan on growing the community? Do they plan on waiting until the current Dominion community is dead and then revive it? I'm just telling Riot to do what they think is right for Dominion. If they don't think Ranked is the way to go then do what they think is right.

No matter how I see it, pretty much ignoring the Dominion community solves nothing but makes people more angry.

There is no respect for Dominion among my real life friends. I help start a League of Legends club at my school and after it finally got approved, I am heavily considering leaving because of all the criticisms I am receiving for preferring Dominion over Summoner's Rift. Even when I play SR, they like to tell everyone that I am not at their level purely because I like Dominion over SR. Not because they spend 3x to 5x more time playing than me.

Edit: Even some sort of unofficial timeline would be greatly appreciated.
Deal with Broken Champions -> Balance individual aspects of the map -> Ranked Trial -> Ranked -> Perhaps tournaments in the future.

Just let us know what you are currently thinking.

Seeing page 100, I'm starting to wonder if we've swapped tactics and are now using the swarm method to get Morello's attention. :P

Okay.

If Ranked suddenly appeared tomorrow in the menu, what difference would it make? The rest of the game still thinks we're a joke, we've still got balance issues at the top level of the roster, and we're still lacking any support from Riot that would cause an influx of population and for people to become educated or actually interested in playing Dominion.

Ranked is not a magic bullet that is going to make us better. We need balance changes, we need promotion of the map in terms of both marketing and some face-time by Riot, and we need some actual growth to occur as a result of these changes. I agree with Riot that Ranked is not a remote priority, I do not agree that they've sat on their asses and not promoted this mode more thoroughly to make Ranked a reasonable option. I would love to see ranked come about and a rise of competitive play as a result, but as it is right now we need a foundation to actually work with before we move to that point. Riot has put up legitimate points in the past why we don't have it but the problem still rests with them for not doing anything about it.

So, basically, yeah. Get out the pitchforks, go pick up some Torches, and let's go swarm some designers.

To be fair, I never said let's lobby for Ranked in that thread. I was just noting that it was a fairly active Morello thread and maybe we could bring Dominion back on his radar. For a while there I honestly started to believe he had a forum filter that automatically filtered out any post with the words Dominion or Crystal Scar in it.

At minimum this thread has shown me that now it's him actively ignoring us, instead of passively ignoring us

I don't think many of us really care about ranked. We just don't want to be completely ignored, and even minor changes here and there would show that Riot is at least trying to keep dominion in mind. We love this mode, but we are plagued with tons of balance issues and tweaks that are months and months past due.

Quite the dilemma though; not enough players play dominion, so it is ignored by Riot. No one plays dominion because it is being ignored.

Hopefully they'll hear our whispers in the mob of SR players.