Locked vs Unlocked Camera in LoL: Which One Should You Use?

Everybody who's been playing a while tells new players to switch to an unlocked camera. Almost nobody explains what you actually gain, or how to switch without spending a week lost somewhere on the map.

League of Legends Guide

Locked vs Unlocked Camera

Settings, Hotkeys and How to Switch

Everybody who's been playing a while tells new players to switch to an unlocked camera. Almost nobody explains what you actually gain, or how to switch without spending a week lost somewhere on the map.

Short answer first: unlocked is better, and it isn't close once you're used to it. The longer answer is that the switch costs you something real for a few days, and there's a middle setting most people have never heard of that makes it a lot easier.

What Each Mode Does

Locked

The camera stays centered on your champion and moves with them. You never lose yourself, and you never see more than a screen's width around you either.

Unlocked

The camera goes wherever you point it: push the mouse to the edge of the screen or use the arrow keys, and snap back to your champion whenever you want.

Semi-Locked

The in-between. Its description says it "allows the camera to be moved while locked, up to an offset where the player's champion is still visible."

Semi-Locked lives in the Camera Lock Mode setting, next to Per-Side Offset and Fixed Offset, which change how a locked camera frames your champion. The locked versus unlocked argument usually happens as if there were only two choices, and this third one has been sitting in the menu the whole time.

The Keys That Matter

Key (default)	What it does
Y	Toggles camera lock on and off (the camera button next to the minimap does the same)
Space (hold)	Centers the camera on your champion for as long as you hold it
F1	Jumps the camera to your own champion
F2 to F5	Jumps to each ally, and holding one follows them
Arrow keys	Scroll the camera without touching the mouse

The one to build everything around is Space. I think of unlocked camera as the camera going wherever I need it, with my thumb bringing it home a second later.

What You Actually Gain

You see ahead of yourself. A locked camera puts your champion in the middle of the screen, so half of what you can see is behind you. In lane that's the half with your own turret in it. Unlocked, you can nudge the camera forward and see the jungler walking out of the fog before he's on top of you.

You can look at fights you're not in. Glancing at the minimap tells you there's a fight. Only the camera tells you whose cooldowns are down, and that's what decides whether you Teleport in or stay where you are.

Long-range spells stop being guesswork. Anything that reaches past the edge of your screen (Super Mega Death Rocket! [R], Enchanted Crystal Arrow [R], the list is long) is a lot easier to aim when you can actually look where it's going.

Teamfights get wider. A locked camera shows you the fight from your champion's point of view. Unlocked, you can frame the enemy carry and whoever's about to reach them (often most of a screen away from where you're standing).

What locked gets right: it's stable and it's one less thing to manage. For a brand new player learning what every champion does, that's a fair trade, and nobody should feel bad about starting there.

How to Switch Without Suffering

Expect the first few games to feel kind of bad. You'll lose track of your champion in a fight, you'll miss last hits you would have taken, and at least once you'll be looking at the wrong lane while someone kills you. That's the cost, and it drops off quickly.

A few things make it shorter:

• Start in Semi-Locked if full unlocked feels too loose. You get to look ahead without ever losing sight of yourself, and moving to fully unlocked later is a small step.
• Treat Space as a reflex. Look somewhere, tap Space, look somewhere else. Most people who "can't play unlocked" are holding the camera still somewhere and forgetting to bring it back.
• Turn the scroll speed up. The mouse and keyboard camera speeds are separate sliders, and the default mouse speed feels slow once you're moving the camera all the time. Our settings guide covers the rest of the options worth changing.
• Do the awkward games somewhere cheap. A few rounds in the practice tool, or a few normal games, are a better place to be lost for a week than ranked. The practice tool guide has drills worth running while you get used to it.

If you want to see what good camera use looks like once it's second nature, a lot of the pro habits you can copy quietly depend on it, from checking the wave before a recall to seeing a jungler coming before he arrives.