

Riot Games announced Thursday that Dominion will be “going away” for a while and that players “shouldn’t worry.” Riot assured fans that Dominion would be back as a featured game mode, and until then, it will be staying at a farm upstate, running and jumping and playing with Magma Chamber and Omen, where there will be improvements to ranked matchmaking and an official hide and seek mode and regular balance fixes.

According to most experts, Dominion will be remembered mostly as a habitat for account-leveling bots, which has spurred the creation of an active black market. Through the black market, players were allowed to purchase level 30 accounts, undeserved end of season rewards, and for some wealthy ex-NBA players, LCS slots.

“Legions of bots who were once quarantined in the safe, uninhabited area of the Crystal Scar will now be forced to migrate upstream,” said /u/VayneGoodall, who once spent 5 minutes in a Dominion queue before leaving to do something else. “Many bots will perish during this journey, and may cause damage to the ecosystem they arrive in, such as another MOBA or possibly even Bronze V.”

With Dominion’s demise, Team Fortress 2 has taken the lead for the coveted title of most neglected game set in a mining operation.

Although the majority of players took Riot for their word on Dominion’s brief leave of absence, some questioned whether Riot would actually be able to remember to bring Dominion back, given that they have successfully forgotten about it for half a decade when it was one of only three game modes to choose from. Another handful asked why, if Dominion was at the farm, all its servers and Prospector’s items were still at the house.

Sources report that Dominion is not in fact at the farm, but was instead accidentally deleted by an intern last month.