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[frostshotgg]

The thing is, there was a very, very small number of people who played nothing but dominion. I enjoyed dominion as an occasional quickie, but there are people who only played league for dominion.

[Arcvasti]

So I heard Dominion is going the way of the dodo bird

Not entirely sure how I feel about that. I went through a brief phase of playing lots of Dominion, a while back. I feel like Dominion occupied this spot in between SR and HA where it was shorter and weirder then the standard game mode, but still required non-insignificant effort and strategic planning. You wouldn't play it casually like ARAM and it felt different enough from normal/ranked modes to be jarring. Still, I feel like straight-up removing it is a bad call, unless its even more underpopulated then I thought it was.

[penguinofhonor]

I don't blame them for not wanting to put resources into it. A dominion bug takes just as much effort to fix as a SR bug, but for every player you'd help with the former, you could help 200 by fixing the latter instead. But making dominion bugs low priority alienates the dominion community further and fuels reddit/forum mobs because people don't need to play dominion to get pissed at Riot about it.

I saw someone praise Riot recently because they're willing to slaughter sacred cows, but this takes it to a new level. It's definitely something I didn't expect them to do.

[Putnam]

I don't blame them for not wanting to put resources into it.

yeah they need to put their resources into more important things, like getting the bathroom doors painted with skin art

[Flying Dice]

I don't blame them for not wanting to put resources into it.

yeah they need to put their resources into more important things, like getting the bathroom doors painted with skin art

What else are Riot employees going to masturbate to, their Ahri boob-bump mousepads? :^)

[penguinofhonor]

I don't see the problem here? I mean, besides tackiness. Every profitable company spends some money on office luxuries, highly successful ones even more so. They're not obligated to spend that money keeping their failing products on life support.

[Putnam]

i didn't bring up the many other completely basic things they've failed to do because they weren't relevant to the topic at hand, but

there are many other completely basic things they've failed to do, like give reasonable practice tools to players or

actually you know what that basically sums up the whole situation, huh? They've completely failed to give reasonable practice tools to players. The only way to improve in any meaningful way is to deal with people online. For a company that spends a lot of resources on preventing bad player experience due to other players' influence, that's kinda odd.

What's the term for this, actually? They don't want to add sandbox mode because it'll add a new insult to people's repertoire (go sandbox noob or w/e). But that insult being added to people's repertoire isn't even remotely as bad as the benefits of having a proper practice mode like every other competitive game that ever took itself seriously and most of them that don't (Mario Party has practice mode, god DAMN). Y'know, benefits like being able to practice without having to deal with people. It negates its own problems!

I actually wouldn't have a problem with Riot if they got their shit together regarding that specifically and also fired and blacklisted every single person who was involved with them for the first year of LoL's life.

EDIT: I was actually hoping that that jab would be taken as lighthearted enough that I wouldn't feel like having to go on another rant about how awful Riot is and how anyone who actually supports them isn't allowed to have an opinion on how bad any other company is, but, uh, that didn't happen.

[IronyOwl]

I'll admit to not being very experienced on the matter, but don't they have an Intro bot difficulty? As I recall bot games are pretty chill.

What's Dota 2's practice tools look like, for comparison? Their Dragon Knight questline thingy?

[Putnam]

this (there isn't even a loading time for switching heroes) and these, primarily, plus replays

[MrRoboto75]

I'll admit to not being very experienced on the matter, but don't they have an Intro bot difficulty? As I recall bot games are pretty chill.

I dunno, it almost feels like the bot matches are too chill.  Like, even on intermediate, I wonder if its possible to lose.

[Putnam]

i can't think of a single game where "play against bots" is reasonable advice for multiplayer practice to anyone but the very most basic of players

[IronyOwl]

this (there isn't even a loading time for switching heroes) and these, primarily, plus replays

That's neat, but does it really help that much? I'm sure it's more convenient than bot or custom AI games, but I'm not sure I see the huge, glaring flaw it fixes.

Replays sound less replaceable, but same question.

i can't think of a single game where "play against bots" is reasonable advice for multiplayer practice to anyone but the very most basic of players

What does that have to do with cheat mode? I mean, I agree, but that feels like an innate limitation to not having super-player-like bots, not something you can solve by including "practice tools" instead.

I'll admit to not being very experienced on the matter, but don't they have an Intro bot difficulty? As I recall bot games are pretty chill.

I dunno, it almost feels like the bot matches are too chill.  Like, even on intermediate, I wonder if its possible to lose.

Oh, it is. Or was, anyway. Haven't done so myself in forever, but when you're terrible and everyone else is terrible, it is (or was) possible for Intermediate Bots to overwhelm you late in the game, because even though they sucked in general they had perfect coordination and reaction times. So once the game got to about an hour and everyone was at full build, they'd just group mid and crush you.

I honestly don't recall if I ever lost against Beginner Bots or not.

[Putnam]

this (there isn't even a loading time for switching heroes) and these, primarily, plus replays

That's neat, but does it really help that much? I'm sure it's more convenient than bot or custom AI games, but I'm not sure I see the huge, glaring flaw it fixes.

Replays sound less replaceable, but same question.

Being able to go in and begin practicing item/ability combos immediately instead of having to spend the 15-20 minutes it takes to farm them against bots. Being able to practice getting your blink dagger distance right/whatever the equivalent in league is (I remember the phrase "flashing over walls") without having to wait for the 12 second cooldown every time (and since flash is a summoner spell IIRC, probably a much longer cooldown) without the farm required to get the item. Practicing skillshots against enemies with various movement patterns without the farm required to get the skill. (you can control the enemies you spawn).

That's just three things off the top of my head, ask someone who's actually good at Dota (I'm 2k, which is about equal to mid-low bronze I'd guess in league) and they'd be able to talk about it for hours. Note also that that's 15-20 minutes time saved every time you want to practice something in particular, which is just unbelievably huge.

[Frumple]

I honestly don't recall if I ever lost against Beginner Bots or not.

I've been in co-op vs AI matches against beginner bots where my team lost.  Sometimes you can actually 1v5 them, sometimes you... can't. Especially when the rest of the team was bad enough they'd been feeding the bots most of the game. It's a fairly hilarious thing to see, honestly. Intermediate bots are actually decently vicious, and notably better than a number of human players, heh. They're indeed exploitable once you're used to them, but so are humans :V

And no, the stuff P's stuck on (for the Nth time, while no doubt continuing to have never actually played LoL) doesn't really make much, if any, difference, in practice, from what I've seen playing both games.

Being fair, I probably haven't played as much DotA2 as LoL at this point (though I've probably played more DotA than either, to my regret), mostly because the former runs (save for load times, anyway) and looks a lot worse on this computer than the latter.

[penguinofhonor]

Yeah, so this has nothing to do with Dominion, it's just the axe you have to grind with Riot. Honestly, it looks like you came in here just to get a good rant about them in.