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Welcome everybody to the full release of Spectator Mode, giving you complete control over the action in League of Legends.
There are a lot of new powerful tools in here that make watching League of Legends better than ever before.
Let’s go over the various features of Spectator Mode and I’ll share a few tips on how to get the most out of it.
There are three ways to view a game: The Custom Game lobby, Spectate Your Friends, and Featured Games.
First, you can join a Custom Game and become a Spectator.
Hit the Join Game button at the bottom, select the game you want to watch, and click “Spectate.”
You’ll watch the players progress through Champion Select, and after a short delay, the game itself.
For those who want to play practice matches in privacy, the host of a Custom Game can choose to disallow spectators.
Second, you can watch your friends play Normal, Ranked, or Custom games.
If any of your friends are in a game, you can right click them on the buddy list, and click “Spectate Game.”
You’ll load into their game and can watch everything as it unfolds.
Third, you can spectate “Featured Games.” When you load into the client, you’ll have a list of live Featured Games that you can view.
These games contain some of the best players in League of Legends so any time you’d like to see some high-skill play, come check out the Featured Games.
All versions of Spectator Mode operate on a three minute delay to ensure that your opponents cannot team up with another player outside the game to give away your position and cheat.
Now that you’re watching a game, let’s look at some of Spectator Mode’s features.
First is “Directed Camera.” When Directed Camera is enabled, it actively captures the most interesting action in the match.
Whether someone’s getting First Blood, the Ancient Golem is being stolen, or two fights are going on at the same time, Directed Camera intelligently moves around the map showcasing every fight without missing a beat.
Directed Camera is on by default, but you can turn it off by pressing “S” and re-enable it with “D.”
You can also guide the Directed Camera. Clicking on a champion will encourage Directed Camera to include that champion as it moves around.
Pressing Spacebar will tell Directed Camera to immediately switch from its current scene to a different contested area on the map.
Near the bottom of the screen, you’ll see the “Timeshift” controls.
Timeshift gives you the ability to speed up, slow down, pause, or jump to different parts of a live game!
If you want to go back and re-watch a team fight, either click the convenient “jump back” button or click on the timeline and watch it again.
You can also slow it down as much as 1/4 speed, because kill steals always look better in slow-mo.
Once you’re done with that, you can fast forward up to 8x speed or skip forward, either to where you left off, or all the way forward to the most recent action.
Additionally, Spectator Mode has a variety of other information and vision features for when you want to control the camera.
Every champion is selectable by pressing or holding 1-5 for the champions on blue team or the letters immediately below them for the purple team.
Double clicking any of these buttons, the champion portraits, or the champions themselves in game will follow that champion until you press Escape or click another champion.
The menus at the bottom left allow you to select follow specific champions and enable or disable Directed Camera, the chat box, and other interface elements.
In team fights you might want to hide a lot of the heads-up display.
Pressing “Tab” or “O” will toggle the bottom scoreboard, while pressing “H” will toggle everything.
Any time you’re spectating a game, you can leave whenever you want with no penalty.
Thanks to Directed Camera I might actually catch First Blood for once.
And no matter how much time I waste watching champions last hit under their turrets, I can always jump back and watch that gank I missed.
To me, Spectator Mode is hugely awesome, and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy this release as much as I do.