Possible Solution for Fixed Cameras

[This was originally posted on the forums just before they shut down]

Hi guys. I'm really happy with the news that the new Summoner's Rift will have an improved view of the bottom of the screen, but I think there's some more room for improvement. As someone who has extreme difficulty coordinating the camera as it currently exists, I find free camera to be absolutely crippling. I've been reading through the various solutions to the purple side locked camera disadvantage, and I have a variation on an idea which has not yet been suggested.

Quote: Originally Posted by boourns View Post (Exerpt) We might consider some kind of camera position biasing, but it has the potential to be really janky. Mostly likely would be a small adjustment to account for the HUD space at the bottom.

Unfortunately with a fixed camera you're always going to have to sacrifice vision range in one part of the screen for another and you're regularly going to run into cases where the wrong part got sacrificed. I agree that on purple side this happens more often at the bottom of the screen, but if we corrected this we could seriously screw you if you loop around a teamfight from the bottom/blue side.

I wish I saw an easy answer to this, but it seems like what people really want is some kind of view that follows their champion and also keeps the part of the action they're interested on screen as well. That's pretty hard to get right since we can't read your intentions. What boourns is referring to here is what was suggested in the original post of this thread by Sorderon: http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com....php?t=3859667 (The pictures are the important part here)

The obvious problem with this option is as boourns has already explained: once you need to loop around, you can't see anything above your character; you encounter the same problem. So if camera position biasing in itself causes problems, how can we modify it on the fly?

The answer I believe will be the least disruptive is with the mouse wheel. Of course, the mouse wheel is already bound to the zoom function, and yet I have never seen a situation in which the camera needs to be zoomed in and out on the fly.

Imagine playing purple side this way: The camera is biased so that it is locked on your champion, and you have more vision of what is to the south. The enemy jungler sneaks up behind you, and you scroll the mouse wheel to center the camera again or even bias it in the opposite direction. It would be "locked" the entire time, always moving with your champion, but very easily repositioned in relation to your champion.

I suspect that this solution would be relatively simple to implement, and it would of course need to be optional. Perhaps certain summoners like to play with their zoom function during an engagement, so let them keep doing it. A single tick box which swaps the zoom function with a locked-camera bias pan function in the interface menu would save countless hours of frustration for the significant minority of players like me, who cringe at the very thought of playing on Purple side.

I would love to hear your responses and ideas relating to this binding swap.