The LoL Rage Thread

But seriously, releasing any more maps if they're not going to take time to adjust things or at least try to, makes it pointless to even have more than one map.

When Riot released TT, they were still newbies. TT was supposed to be designed to be a smaller, faster map with wild encounters and plays. Obviously some champs were better in TT than others. They tried to take the easy way out on balancing champions on both maps by manipulating the map itself. Most notably, these were the neutral buffs and the minions.

One of the main problems that persisted was that since LoL was previously balanced around SR, a real tank champion will be able to withstand punishment from 5 enemy team members for some amount of time. Tanks in TT will get roughly the same amount of gold, and will still get tanky items, but there will only ever be 3 enemy champions to try and take him out.

So when they designed Dominion, they opted to keep the team member count as 5. They also tried to achieve balance by introducing items and using map elements/aura. This time, they are moderately successful, although edge cases will be OP/UP. Dominion was also designed to have radically different elements to it that offers an entirely different experience to SR. The most noticeable one is that games end much faster, while allowing you to participate in action much more often. Arguably, the different experience will attract its own set of players.

Dominion, unlike TT, is in a much more playable state and has much more replay value due to a much wider pool of champions that are viable on some level. However, unless the developers give the different map modes the amount of care and attention that SR gets, they won't be as popular as SR. And supposedly Dom is newer than TT, so it will take time for the competitive scene to grow. Riot is aggressively expanding their employee base so they can get things done faster in parallel, but they simply don't have the resources to take on a larger load, such as balancing champions by tweaking their instance values dependent on the mode type.

SR has had its own share of glitches and exploits though. For example, Blitzcrank could pull dragon and blue team would be able to "snipe" it for global gold. That wasn't fair for purple team. Jungle buffs were also providing too much to the team that controlled them. They're a major factor into why M5 was destroying everyone, since controlling the jungle was their specialty.

But ultimately Riot does this stuff in the name of providing fun value. ARAM is hardly balanced, and there's no matchmaking, but people play it anyways.