THIS!!!!!!

I can't answer for everyone but the reason I prefer locked is because it's easier to take note of everything happening around my champion with less fuss.

Ok I'll try and keep it simple,
-While using camera locked how much time is your cursor been used to control your LOS? Only while dragging on minimap which I don't do while in dangerous situations.
-While using unlocked about every 4th cursor movement(guesstimate to prove a point) is used to Improve/change your LOS which means while doing that you can't do anything else(spells,attacks,move) sure it only takes less then a second to change your LOS so that your cursor is back into a situation to move or if you needed to but that is still time wasted if you can achieve the same things with locked camera.

That's the problem IMO the solutions I had have been shut down.(flipped map,Zoomed out further,Rubberbanding from champion effect)

But there is one I just thought of that could work.

"Lock onto cursor" Option? Yes/No?

you know it might be the difference between good and great players, but the fact is ONLY SOME CHAMPS BENEFIT FROM AN UNLOCKED SCREEN. The ones it doesn't matter with NEED ONLY A BETTER VIEW ON PURPLE TEAM

Thank you very much for engaging the camera lock players in a conversation!

I play with my camera locked because I feel it "can be" superior to unlocked. There are so many times that I see even the highest elo players taking a death because they had their camera out of position that I think a strong case can be made. I do rebind my space bar to lock/unlock the camera for quickly viewing other parts of the game so I have to admit I play a hybrid locked play style.

When I play unlocked I find that I spend 85% or more of the game holding space bar anyway. Being that I am in control of my champion and I understand the pathing, having my camera moving with my champion very rarely makes targeting/last hitting an issue. I simply predict where the target will be for a click rather than attempting to click where they are and normally don't have an issue.

Everything works out fine for me until I try to play a champion that has the range to attack to the edge of the fog of war from the purple side of the map. I find it so frustrating to play from the purple side of the map that I just end up playing against bots because I'm guaranteed to get blue team. I enjoy the game enough to play the bots for a couple hours a day but I'd really like it if I could PvP like the game is intended to be played.

Back to the quote, I disagree that map mirroring would be destructive in any way as an option. Holding on to hope that one day map mirroring will one day be added is what keeps me pumping quarters into this game honestly. Are you really making the point that players who look at each others screens during a game to coordinate need to be able to see their team on the same side of the map? That just doesn't seem important in the least what-so-ever to me, why wouldn't you just look at your own screen and use oral communications like a normal human being? Furthermore I can't see merit in you saying that it's technically risky and time consuming. Just open up the HUD for modding to let the community mirror the map themselves and see how time consuming it is.

I don't mean to sound snarky but this issue is the main reason I don't even bother trying to compete in ranked games even though I think I could be competitive it's not worth the frustration of playing bot lane purple side.

Again, thanks for taking the time to address this issue and I hope map mirroring isn't off the table forever. If it really is off the table forever it'd be nice to know sooner rather than later but I just noticed a poll where there is overwhelming support for map mirroring so I have some hope! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE reconsider.

I don't think you understand my point about team communication, if you mirror the map directions for up/down/left/right are no longer consistent for people in the same game. Also it causes the jungle and baron/dragon to mirror image itself. So your vocal/typed communication is based on two different views of the map.

Once again, this does not really solve the problem of champions who have skillshots past the view of your screen and you'll still have the same FOV problems if you come at a team fight from the top.

It's technically risky because we would have to add in a bunch of tech all over the place. Not the say it can't be done, but it's a pretty tough sell internally for the benefits since it's not really a full solution to the problem. Unfortunately, we're probably not releasing the source art for the maps for modding!

I'd like to investigate some more elegant camera control options that bridge locked camera and free, but I don't think that map mirroring is as complete solution as I would like.

Thanks for your feedback, even if we can't always accomodate all of your requests, we are interested and listening!

Thank you again for taking the time to talk about this issue.

But I still don't see why it would have any effect on team communication, and even if it did it would be an option. But if you really look at how teams communicate, like using pings, and calling out areas of the map by map objective, you never hear people saying go left, or right. I do see your point on Baron/Dragon but players could adapt to knowing that the baron is the top lane or even start calling the lane baron lane instead of top lane. Anyway it would be an option so if a player chose to activate purple mirror mapping it would be up to them to communicate top/bot effectively and I honestly think that's an easier task to accomplish than overcoming the blue side advantage.

Also, coming at a team fight from top is easier to deal with than laning from top most of the game. Just IMHO but you're looking for opinions right?

I guess my point boils down to it being an option, not being bad because more options are good and optional. And this specific option would make a lot of people very happy.

I've also been thinking about this. I did try out BLC a bit but never stuck to it (too much of mindless brawling rather than working towards a team objective) but I did like the nifty camera.

I do realise BLC uses the asdw keys for movement and the mouse for aiming, while lol uses the mouse for both parts but I think it would be interesting still.
Thinking it would be nice to be able to chose this smart camera lock over the regular camera lock, so when you hold space bar down the camera tries to adjust itself to keep your cursor and champion on the screen, and when the distance between them becomes too great the cursor wont go any farther, and the camera will stop as well.
If you want the cursor to scroll the camera simply let go of space bar and the normal free camera is back.

The tricky part might be getting the feel of cursor speed right when swapping between free and smart lock since if the cursor moves in camera space while the camera itself is moving that's going to increase the overall cursor speed.

Im only a level 15 player but I started out always locking my camera and i had some terrible pvp games when i was first starting out as purple. Its only taken me about a week to get used to having it unlocked but i wish id known sooner. only time it really annoys me is when im trying to run away and im just in a bad camera position but theres always the space bar then

Feature Request
Add in the options the ability for locked camera users to offset where the camera lock position is. Would make me happy, you wouldn't have to change the zoom level if I could play summoner's rift on purple team and actually see what is happening in the lane below me. Maybe just add some key-bindings to shift the offset (arrow keys when locked maybe?) so that I can choose where I want my field of vision to be locked.

Makes more sense than the current configuration which is currently displaying 2x the distance above my character than the distance below due to default camera angle and would be extremely simple to code.

As for why I play locked:
I can not stress enough the level of frustration I have when I am on the purple team in summoners rift defending the bottom turret and am getting shot by players that are not even in my field of vision. I know they are there, and I can unlock my camera to allow me to see them, but I don't enjoy playing that way. I love playing the game with the camera locked because it makes me feel more like I am controlling something rather than macro-managing something if that makes sense. I was never a big fan of pure RTS games (I did play a lot of them and enjoyed most, but it is not my preferred genre) but I absolutely loved games like Diablo that promoted character development and made your character the center of the action.

Also, I am not sure where Riot gets its numbers for how many people play with the camera locked, but everyone I play with spends at least 80% of the time with the camera locked. I'm pretty sure if a poll was run via the login client, you could find out the exact amount of each type of player.

Put me in another bucket that finds it much easier to hit skill shots (yes long range like say Ashe are out though) and last hit in fixed mode. I'm quite happy w/Morgana's skill shots but her range is within the FoV.

UI observation in general: Mouse too over loaded. I can free up more brain cycles for target and predicting if camera is not on mouse too.

Camera specific observations for FoV and targeting: I'm certainly not an elite, just started this game, but do game a lot. I saw you collected data. Have you sorted that for age and gender? Women, and people as they age have more general eye tracking and eye tracking triggered nausea issues. The camera needs to not move too fast, and FoV should be as wide as possible to give a mental frame of reference to avoid the tracking/nausea brain loop.

Someone did a study on this for games once .. no link handy sorry. So for us "fixers" we have to have that reference point, lack of big,fast camera swings and comfortable FoV or it goes south. It is a real vision-brain thing like color blind. Obviously, someone that has it severely can't play a game like this. But for the rest that are just prone to it, fixing is the best answer. If you want to see somewhere else, slow moving camera or snap 1-frame transition is best for us. The fast blur is really bad. Color blindness is just more common in the gaming population, but we are all getting older so this will show up more and more as UI consideration.

The mini-map is great for us fixers btw.

I didn't take the time to read every post, so sorry if someone has already mentioned this, but what if locking the camera didn't necessarily make it centered?

I've thought several times how useful it would be to lock the camera off-center. That way, the camera still moves relative to you (which enables the easier landing of skillshots, since you know where you are), but you still get a greater vision range.