Cons of Unlocked camera.
- Lose your champ in the shuffle
- camera controls are clunky

Cons of Locked camera
- poor vantage point
- no direct 'free look'

I'll reiterate something that has been suggested before in a few different ways:
Relative Camera Lock.
After locking, you can still move the camera, but only with keys (up, down, left right) as opposed to the mouse, so that you don't accidentally move the camera. After moving the view, the camera locks relative to where you are on the screen. You now still know exactly where you are on the screen (as it's always in the same spot), but you are not locked to the exact middle of the screen (unless you want to not change it).

This way you get the benefits of locked (you know where you are and have the map in a "relative" manner) and the benefit of unlocked (can extend your range and be more "map aware"). It's not restrictive (you can adjust any amount you'd like) and it is valuable throughout the game, as you could adjust it in whatever direction you are traveling.

I would love this feature as Ezreal and as just about any champion I would play.

Well, assuming you haven't watched too much modern television, the sudden shift of near everything on screen gives you the big alert that you want. It isn't instant, just fast, so it's not like you just flashed somewhere for no reason.

You instantly have the ranges of all the enemy champions and towers you can see, and know exactly how doomed you are.

How does an unlocked camera player feel when Tristana ults or Alistar headbutts them? Are they firing skillshots off and wondering why they're coming from off screen?

When I played unlocked, I still knew where my champion was, but just a little bit later, then I had to scroll to where I could reasonably see them as I ran back to the fight, then scroll back over the fight as it moved... just too much imput for me to handle, really. I may as well have had a .75 sec stun tacked on for all the reaction time it cost me to keep realigning.

I know this is 18 posts later, but in your first post, boourns, you quoted yourself on how you feel locked camera puts players at a disadvantage when it comes to skill shots.

I'm sure someone has said something similar, but I play locked screen and I am the best at skillshots in the group of people I play with. Several of them were silver and gold by the end of last season. I actually believe it's because I play locked that I'm better at skillshots as I learned to anticipate a player's movement while they were in the "fog of war" for me. This also helped me with blind skillshots through walls and Baron steals.

Of course, I have no idea where this puts my skill level in the grand scheme of things because saying I'm better than my friends isn't terribly informative, and I'm unranked. :\

Just give us a couple more clicks out for zoom and we'll be good. It is easy to get lost when you are constrained to see so little.

Seriously all you have to do is add a hot key to unlock/lock the camera. Hell you can make space do this. Tag space once to free the camera, tag it again to lock your camera on your champion. If people hate it just make it an option that you can activate or not.

or

Put the accidental release of that patch a week or 2 ago where when you left click on the minimap and it unlocks the camera taking you to that spot. Then it did what ever t did aftwerwards. You already have the code for this. Again you could just add this into the options for people to activate it or not if they don't like it.

To be honest I would love both of these options. Either would drastically improve gameplay for many players.

My problem is I play on uneven surfaces almost all the time so unlocked, I find to be to dangerous to play in most of the time unless I need to see a fight I am going to or using a global.

The 'Y' button is already the hotkey to lock/unlock the camera, by default.

Before I begin, I apologize if this has been suggested already, but I've skimmed through this thread and didn't see it suggested. Although, I could have easily skipped something.

The reason I tend to shy away from unlocked camera is the matter of aiming skill shots near the edge of the screen. It can be annoying, and in some cases have dire consequences. Although, I don't personally tend to lose where my character is at in unlocked that much, but I acknowledge that other people may have this issue and this suggestion probably doesn't address that particular problem.

There is, however, something that would make unlocked camera infinitely more usable to me: a modifier key (lets use shift for this example, even though I know it's already used for smartcasting) that disallows the camera from being moved by touching the edge of the screen while it is held in. Or possibly the opposite. The screen can only move while it's held in. Maybe even have both there as a toggleable option. Obviously, the modifier key's binding should be configurable by the user.

Even though implementing this functionality would be trivial, I'm not sure if you would consider this a band-aid solution or not. Given the fact that you probably have more experience in UI design then I do, your opinion on that matter is probably more educated then mine.

I used a mod a while back changing my own health bar, this helped al lot in messy teamfight with champions like akali and lee sin for instance. Since space is always in reach its not hard to center on your champion, the problem is identifying yourself in that mess. At the moment I'm not using the mod any more, lost it during reinstall and don't need it at the moment, playing with it helped me focussing on myself better in team fights. At the moment a players own health bar is a little different from others, but not by much.

Anyway, I don't thing losing oneself in a team fight is a camera issue but more a visual issue.

Create a option to rotate camera 90º.

Blue: bottom/left --> top/right
Purple: bottom/right --> top/left

"Top" be "top"... "bot" be "bot"... no communication problem