As Vesh said it's usually easy to know by the champions picked and the players as well. It does help to have people stumble into it and discover it.

I can always tell by the background image (shows crystal scar or trees, not sure about twisted treeline as I never spectate the ones with trees). However, I'm not sure if this is just me or a legit bug, but every time I get out of a dominion game the background image of every spectate-able game looks like the one for crystal scar despite being either summoners rift or crystal scar (kind of misleading, because I already know how awesome crystal scar is )

Personally, I'd still like to see different labels for Dominion and Summoner's Rift in the featured games listings. I actually keep an eye out for certain champions when I am in the mood to spectate, so I look for these games so I can look at some build paths that people use (for both modes). I also would like to get into Dominion more, but it's tough when you really don't know what to DO in the mode as far as objectives are, what benefits your team most, what items work best, etc. Moreover, at least there are Dominion matches available in featured games! This is still a step above Twisted Treeline, where there are no featured matches at all.

While one might say that people would avoid them because they're Dominion, I'd venture a lot of people would watch them because they're Dominion, and there's a way to differentiate them from normal Summoner's Rift games. (Right now you can just ignore normals altogether and watch ranked if you're only interested in Summoner's Rift anyway, so I do not agree with the argument that people might be ignoring Dominion, because they can already do so if they wish.)

I'll join the argument that normal SR games shouldn't even be in there. I sincerely doubt anyone would watch them over ranked unless well known players were playing a normal for some reason.

oh, interesting. i just confirmed that and i've forwarded it along to the team that will fix it.
as to the point of changing the label, i'll message the designer in charge of making the call one way or the other.

thanks for mentioning it!

Thanks for the starting the wheels going on the bug fix

I just wish it didn't crash half the time I try to spectate a Dominion game.

Not telling people the difference between dominion and summoner's rift seems sort of...dishonest '~'. I mean, I usually spectate summoner's rift matches because I want to see how to lane with a champion. Seems like an added hassle.

Interesting note in reference to that bug. If you cycle through the games and run across one that is actually a dominion game the other games will fix themselves and display the summoners rift picture if you go back to them. If none of the 5 games are dominion they'll just stay with the dominion picture until the game list refreshes.

Don't know if it'll help fix it but it's a nice way to get around it for the moment. Just cycle through them all twice and you'll know if any are dominion or if they're all SR.

thanks for the extra info!