I’ve been playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic over the last few months, playing on a PvE server, having a grand old time leisurely questing and amusing myself over how I can take a Sith Warrior and be as Dark Side as possible, and currently, taking a Jedi Consular, and, being as Dark Side as possible.
I made a “joking” remark that as a result of playing SWTOR instead of League of Legends as much, I’ve been generally a calmer, more relaxed and less stressed out person over this span of time.
Well, all that’s recently come a crashing end, because I’m like 4-8 in my recent history of matches, and with each tragic loss on account of my own shortcomings and/or someone else’s, I’m left feeling dejected, disappointed and wondering why I even love this game so much in the first place.
One of the games was one of those miserable ARAM games where my team wasn’t a terrible draw of randomly selected characters, but the other team was a nightmare team from hell that had a Morgana, Ashe, Veigar, Vel’Koz and a Ryze; mostly champions who could sit back from a safe distance, pelt you with ranged attacks and whittle you down and away, before taking objectives. Needless to say, I lost that game, but it was during this game did I realize that something was not right, in-game.
Contrary to the vast majority of LoL players, I play League with a locked camera. Yes, I can hear anyone reading this opening the barn and trotting their high horse out of the stable to tell me how inferior of a player I am for doing this to myself, and honestly in this matter, I don’t particularly fucking care what you think. I play with a locked camera, because it’s how I feel the most comfortable, and when I’m comfortable I feel that I can play the most effective.
Believe me, I’ve heard it all to why this is a reason why I am only as good as I am, will never improve, and how I’m only doing a disservice to myself. I obviously lack map awareness, the ability to accurately global skill shot or teleport, and will never become a competent jungler, because I play on a locked camera, and not because I don’t dedicate hours and hours to practicing to improve myself.
The vast majority of people out there drive automatic transmission cars. Almost everyone I know drives an automatic car. I’m pretty sure I don’t need more than two hands to name off the people that I know that can drive a stick shift.
The automatic transmission is the locked camera. It’s how League by default introduces the game for new players, when you first play the tutorial modes, learning how to last-hit minions, take towers, and kill enemy champions with Ashe on the Howling Abyss.
When players spread their wings and fly, the vast majority of them are taught to unlock their cameras, and to control the game map on their own. This is akin to learning how to drive a stick shift; for some, it comes easier than it does others, but with enough practice, anyone can learn how to manage it, and on a long enough timeline, it might become second nature and the primary means of playing the game.
I know this analogy is a little wonky, because when it comes to cars, I’m actually a stick shift driver, but when it comes to its application to League, I’m very much an automatic transmission player.
I never had that teaching or explanation that the unlocked camera was god almighty and the only way that the game should be played. So I never did. I’ve been playing since late season 1, and played thousands of games between Summoner’s Rift, ARAM and even some Dominion, all with a locked camera.
Not lost on me was the fact that by being a locked camera player, I had one prevalent weakness (among all my other shortcomings); when on red side, I simply received less visual information than my blue side counterparts, because LoL is played from a part-bird’s eye/part-isometric perspective, where by virtual of viewing angle, the blue side sees more than the red side at any given point. This meant that I had a tougher time dodging skill shots than players with unlocked cameras, because they can compensate for the lesser vision by adjusting their view to where they can see the opponents better. With better vision comes more time to anticipate, adjust and dodge better than the amount of vision that I have with a locked camera.
I’ve tried to play with an unlocked camera, to tragic results. I don’t have the wrist dexterity to be flicking the camera back and forth to comfortable positions, while subsequently playing the macro games of farming creeps, harassing the enemies, while trying to keep tabs on potential ganks.
Imagine learning how to drive a stick shift; in an empty parking lot it seems feasible and even easy, but when you’re put into a situation where you’re stuck in traffic adverse weather conditions, or an extremely crowded road. Most people, if they had the ability to magically convert their car from manual to automatic with the press of a button, they’d probably do it, so that they can maximize their comfort to overcome immediate adversity. That’s me.
Somewhere along the line, Riot Games got wind that not every single player was comfortable playing with a stick shift, and introduced the Per-Side Offset Locked Camera, for automatic drivers. Long story short, it was a locked camera perspective that off-centered the player a little bit, depending on if they were blue side/red side. Sure, this meant that blue side players got even more visual information, but it also meant that it helped mitigate the biggest weakness for red side players, the diminished amount of vision, in comparison to the blue side.
With this feature, I genuinely felt that playing on the red side was substantially improved than before. With the slightly increased amount of vision I had, I could better see a Nidalee getting into position to spam a spear toss, I could keep an eye out on the Thresh or Blitzcrank trying to sneak into a bush to attempt a hook or grab, and I wasn’t getting pelted by every single skill shot that I couldn’t really see coming.
In the aforementioned game against the nightmare team that I tragically lost, I was getting nailed by everything. Morgana was hitting her binds, every Ashe volley just barely managed to connect, and I wasn’t seeing where Vel’Koz’s Qs were coming from. During one of the 10+ times I died and was waiting for respond, I wondered, “is Per-Side Offset” turned on? I mean, it had been a while, and I had caught up from nearly two patches ago, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for some settings to have reset themselves.
So I toggled the perspective modes back and forth, and discovered that there was no change at all. After I died yet again, I alt-tabbed out of the game, and quickly googled “Per-Side Offset League not working,” and noticed quite a number of hits from Leagueoflegends.com and Reddit, of threads of a similar problem. After the game mercifully ended, I delved into the threads and got confirmation of what I pretty much already figured out – Per-Side Offset was no longer working.
To cut to the chase, in the particular thread that I’ve linked to, it’s very obvious that I’m not the only primary locked-camera player in the world, that there are quite a good bit of people who do it as well, and that the thread (at this time) is over 10 days old, and has not been fixed. Subsequently, there is a lot of resentment towards Riot for not fixing the problem, and my favorite, all the accusations that “Rito” prioritizes superficial, short-term profit-making affairs like skin sales and champion releases, over the functionality of their cash cow, and the general satisfaction of their dedicated user base.
Imagine being told that there was a critical flaw in all automatic transmission vehicles. All automatic cars would have diminished gas mileage, and the defrosters would require twice as much time to work. And that it would probably be best if you just switched to a manual transmission and go learn to cope with it.
That’s kind of how I think all of this whole situation feels like. Riot really doesn’t care that much about a niche minority of their user base, as indicative of their dragging their feet in regards to fixing it. Angry users aren’t off-base with their accusations, because it’s true, if there’s a problem with anything in regards to microtransactions, Riot will make a hot-fix on the spot. If an item is broken, because an algorithm of ability power times base-level AP increase plus 30% increase from Rabadon’s Deathcap divided by magic penetration is off by two-hundredths, and Korean professionals are exploiting it in game, it will be fixed immediately.
But fixing a camera perspective takes over 10 days to resolve? That’s not cool, and that’s not right. Locked camera users may be a substantial minority in the grand spectrum of the League player base, but we’re no less passionate and involved with the game’s landscape than everyone else driving around in stick shift cars. Blatantly de-prioritizing any subset of a populous, because it’s a minority one is disheartening and discouraging, especially when these are all people who mostly care and are still involved in the overall growth and flourishing of the game and culture.
