League of Legends' Dominion limited beta beginning soon

The Dominion update for League of Legends is undoubtedly the most anticipated change to the game since its launch. Sure, it might be a new map, but it’s far from “just” a new map. Dominion is more akin to a sequel, adding a new Capture and Hold mode to the popular multiplayer online battle arena (you might have read about it in the most recent issue of PC Gamer). Said update has been rumored to be releasing “any day now” for several weeks, and considering that most of the content is already patched into the game, it’s more a matter of waiting on Riot to flip the switch and activate it. That day is rapidly approaching, it seems, and though it’s not going to be fully available right away, Riot says that it is going to allow players to test it out on a “beta” level very soon.

The beta will be available to all League of Legends players, though the initial launch will be limited to “off peak” hours. We checked in with PR manager Chris Heintz for more information on when these hours might be, but were told that Riot wasn’t ready to announce specific times, and that it “will be running said beta on all platforms (NA, EUW and EUNE) initially at times when we have lower than peak concurrency.” He did, however, confirm that the plan is to ramp up testing as time goes on… assuming everything goes smoothly.

And we’re hoping it does. League of Legends fans know how awful Riot’s servers can be after a normal patch with downtime, lag, and absurdly long queues. Making sure the servers are ready for the influx of players is extremely important, and we’d rather wait a few more weeks than have the game fall apart under the load of millions of players trying to test out Dominion for themselves.