The automatic camera should have more options like for example, have interest priority on a certain lane or champion, and deny them too. For exemple my friend plays top lane. I want to watch him but also the rest of the game while I have no interest in the bot lane.
Would be cool.

And a record options to save replays of course.

Is there a way to hide the featured match thing if I want to look at recent updates and other stuff Riot has posted. Like where the matches are now the feed that used to be there?

I really appreciate your time working on and bringing the community this awesome and well developed feature. So, I feel it is my duty to offer comprehensive feedback to help it become even better:

Generally, it works better than I expected. There are, however, a few things I was hoping to see that I do not. This I will also list below throughout the post where appropriate:

#1 - No ability to view Champion select process
#2 - No ability to view Summoner Chat (on both sides) - This is important to show team leadership (despite the negative of trolling)
#3 - No ability to watch featured matches from the very beginning. (some of the more interesting things happen in the first 2 minutes of the game).
#4 - Spectating limitations (Screen resolution modes - No ability to chat with other players on your friendslist while spectating, within client so no way to spectate multiple games at once.)


I think directed camera works pretty well, and usually captures the action. This is a game of seconds though, and some times the 5 second timer is a bit too long to swap to a fight and capture a death.

If I am sitting at my desk, I prefer the manual controls, as I am able to focus on action and champions play specifically. Directed camera is smooth, and the transitions are also very smooth.


I think the featured games option is amazing, and I've gotten a lot of feedback from friends about their ability to learn tremendously from featured games. They also mentioned they saw me a few times on it, which is a cool feeling for a player and gives incentive that was not there previously to play solo queue ranked at a higher level.(something that can be looked into).

My only complaint, which I mentioned above, is the inability to see chat/champion select/first few minutes of the game (where a lot can be learned from)


This is a cool feature - It seems more rewarding to people that have larger friends-lists or higher ranked friends. Because of the friends list limitations, some people may want to spectate someone that they played with recently and thought was really good, but won't add them to friends.

I'd like to see the spectating options expanded - maybe allowing players to have a "Following" list - where they can track 20 summoners for the sole purpose of spectating their games.


I really like the time shift controls and the information displayed, but I do have 3 suggestions.
#1 - It would be nice to see a HP overlay on the left or right side, showing their HP by number on their portrait or on their health bar.
#2 - It would be awesome to have a compressed list that showed gold/earned by player and items at the same time.
#3 - A suggestion again to show Chat (what players actually type)

I will repost the bugs - but what I've seen:

• Burn-in - +gold, or odd things like text for Olaf's ult stuck on the screen throughout the game
• Screen repositioning after selecting to watch a game - Sometimes will pop to the lower right hand of the screen and lock there (happens if multi-tasking in chrome, and sometimes randomly
• Lag spikes - Big fights, and at random occurances the game will lock up a bit.

All-in-All this is stellar, and I really appreciate you guys releasing this. The negative aspect of spectating, is that I play a lot less now, and watch a lot less streams, because the quality and content provided by spectating is far superior to watching a stream (that is not a spectating+commentary stream) when I am looking for information/wanting to learn.

Can't wait for replay mode. Keep up the amazing work.

Pretty smooth. It's actually smoother than my actual game = =

The camera walk is really impressive- I was kinda afraid of it being 'jumpy' but the movement is gentle on my eyes which makes it easy to watch long games.


Selection of games is decent.

The process however, is rather difficult- the reasons are as follows:
1. I often want to check the names of the summoners before I watch them. However, the arrow buttons to scroll through the games is too small that I often need to reall focus getting the mouse cursor exactly on top of that tiny little thing.

2. The graphics upon switching between 'only champions' to 'champions + summoner names' is smooth but takes a tad too long to get on with it. Creates an unnecessary delay before I can click the tiny arrow key to scroll through.



I wish I could see the components of the champion statistics such as the Attack Damage distinguishing between the base damage to the bonus. It would allow me to figure out their rune/mastery setting and learn from it.

Timeshift controls is one thing I don't really like to use much. It kinda lags a bit in a sense and takes a couple seconds too long to shift back and forth- which sometimes make it not really worth using.

First off: Great work!!!

As to the requested feedback:

General

• Let us know if interactions or functionality did not work as you expected.

Sometimes I am watching a game and actually want to know how it ends. But I'm either not directly in front of the PC, or my hands are otherwise busy and I have to run off without having a chance to pause. If the replay plays to the victory screen before I get back, I can't rewind and finish the game. It's gone. I want to be able to rewind even after the nexus explodes. Stop the replay at the last frame where the controls are still up and bring up a quit button, that will play out the exploding animation and end the game when clicked.

I have two little kids and this happens somewhat frequently.

Directed Camera

• Does it show you what you want to see during a match?
• How do you feel about the camera motion/movement?
• Have you switched from Directed to Manual camera control? Thoughts about the process?

Sometimes when multiple fights happen at once the camera jumps are rather unexpected. It takes a second to realize where you jumped to and why. In cases like this I find myself feeling the camera could jump a second sooner. Especially for casual players who will not react as fast as experienced casters. Sometimes I find myself watching a farm lane and see a jungler set up for a gank in another lane on the minimap. The camera doesn't pan to it until after the engagement already happened and they are chasing the player into the tower, focusing on the escape summoner spell used. It would be far more useful to see how the gank was initiated, particularly to new players watching featured games.

Sometimes it will pan to a player and center on them with other players on the edge of the frame, then take a few seconds to move off-center to include lane opponents. I noticed this particularly when moving (directed) to a purple team player in bottom lane with opponents in their own lane bush.

It feels a little clunky when I try to focus on someone in particular. I feel it does not prioritize that person enough. Sometimes it will randomly jump across the map, to a place that doesn't have anything any more exciting going on than what the person I am interested in is doing. I'd rather watch my focus farm than another lane trade (especially top when its minor and just gets out-sustained on both sides). At the same time, not everyone will want to focus exclusively on that person. Perhaps a sensitivity option would be good here. Setting like "Pan away for:" Kills only, Summoner spell used/gank, Player on player damage.

I find when I try to focus a player with directed camera it will look at them, but frequently pan up to the opponent and target them. It includes the player focused, but the target frame jumps around. I would rather see the skill levels/cooldowns/xp bar of the person I am focusing than their opponent. If I wanted to see the latter, I would just focus them instead.

When spectating friends in solo queue, I find myself turning off directed camera and double clicking the player to focus exclusively on them. However, this gets clunky when the player dies. Perhaps directed camera could take over in this case and follow the action the dead player was involved in, at least until the focus player's assist timer expires. Then continue directed mode until the player respawns, turn off directed camera and lock on the player again (abort function if player manually changes camera settings while focus is dead).

Locking back on to the focus player after death would be very useful for me. I find myself spectating friends hands-free while I can't commit to a game. When they die it kind of "breaks" the spectating until I can free up my hands to focus again.

Featured Games (on the landing page)

• How do you feel about the selection of games?
• Thoughts about the process of choosing and getting into a game?

The game time on the landing page really bothers me. It's misleading. It's the actual game time not adjusted for spectator delay and is severely counter-intuitive. I found myself searching for a game I can watch "from the start", then finally picking one that was 7 minutes in. Except with the delay in place, when you spectate, the game is actually only 4 minutes in. If I didn't waste a couple minutes looking for a game with a shorter existing duration, I would have caught it all.

I also really wish we could spectate a game and rewind to the beginning. Or at least jump ~10 minutes back so we can watch a game that's gone on for a few minutes from the start. Particularly for featured games.

I wish we knew more about the game before jumping in. If It's a ranked game, I would like to see the Elo of the players, or at the very least an average Elo of the 10 players involved. Make the mode display Normal/Ranked(AvgElo).

An option to go to a spectator lobby that shows current (-3min) game state would also be helpful. Show the bottom pane with KDA CS Items and the top score pane with total gold/kills/towers.

Drop-In (off your Friend List)

• Thoughts about the process of getting into a game?

Selecting spectate from the friends list should go to spectator lobby as above. Show me who they are playing with/against and the two score panes. Game mode and Average Elo if Ranked. For all I know, they are in a custom by themselves testing a jungle start.

There should be a spectator lobby button next to store/profile/etc buttons in the top right of pvp.net where you can pick between featured and friend games in addition to the existing "quick launch" options.

Spectator HUD

• Thoughts about the information displayed? Too much? Info missing?
• Thoughts about using Timeshift Controls?

Let me rewind a game that already played to the end. Other than that, I like the time controls.

I sometimes find myself wanting to re-arrange the order the players appear in on the bottom score pane, so I can line them up according to their roles/lanes. Trying to compare cs and items doesn't feel as intuitive when the respective lane opponents are not side by side. I see tournament casters run into this on a regular basis as well.

Perhaps some additional format options could be added to that pane.

I would like an option to mirror the left half of that pane. Put the Champion icons on the inside next to each other. Then have the other columns towards the outside with CS, KDA, items respectively. Another option to show summoners and ult cooldowns on the inside between the champ icons (in addition to the other info, expanding the frame) to see which team is ready for, or avoiding a fight at a glance. This is much harder to tell with the information spread around the outside border. Perhaps an option to click the column header for each of these section to show/hide them. Have the gold count expand the same way instead of replacing the items. That would give us the option to, for example, hide KDA CS and look only at current(total) gold and items. Perhaps clicking the column header for the champ icons could bring up list sorting options.

The expanding frame would be an issue for low res 4:3 screens, causing issues with the minimap. This could be handled by moving the target frame to the top left corner as it is in-game and perhaps adjusting the location of the Camera Mode box. Then center the bottom pane based on the empty space between screen edge and minimap. If it's still an issue, limit low resolutions on how many columns can expand at once.

It might be too much clutter, but a little dot next to the champion icons in the score pane indicating Red/Blue/Baron buff would be interesting as well. Something that looks like the latency box with three frames, one each color, lighting up when the champion has the corresponding buff. Jungler has red? Better pay more attention to him. Wow look at that, blue team hasn't had a single blue buff this game. Clicking on the champ icon column header could reveal options to show it on the bottom of the icon, side, or off. Side would show it on the right for blue team, left for purple.

Something like the attachment, collapsible to what you want to see, with gold as an additional expandable column.

Just a few things I think would be nice:

1) Have a button for each character that would let you see runes and masteries. This can be as simple as having the rune icon with a role over mouse box with info so save ui space. The mysteries may just have to settle with 0-0-0 numbers, but I think this can be done and would be very beneficial for people who want to learn.

2) Allow spectating of spectators! What I mean by this, is if a friend on your list is spectating a game of someone who is not on your friends list, allow spectating of that third party game through the friend you do have listed. That's a mouth full. =)

3) I have also noticed that when you spectate a friend who is in champ select, it often / if not always puts your friend on the "anonymous" side of champ select. I can see all names of the enemy side, but my friend is a "Summoner #". Not sure why this is.

Anyway, I love spectator, you guys did a great job! Keep it up.

-Cheers

I think you should be able to watch games of any player just by typing in their name and not just your friends (since you can watch featured games already with people who are not your friends).
I also think all the spectators of a game should be grouped into one spec game and be able to communicate with other spectators and share their thoughts on the play.
Also not sure if it was intended but you should be able to speak with your friends while spectating, the 3 minute delay should be sufficient to prevent ghosting by itself.

Can we have an option to spectate our friends in real time? But only the side of our friends and not the entire map/both teams.

It would help to teach them or guide them better.

I would like the option to spectate a game my friend is spectating.

Fantastic feedback, guys! Thanks to everyone contributing.