League of Legends – Focus on the Map and Win the Game

Map awareness is one of the most important things in League of Legends. It’s just something that you don’t expect from low ELO players, but something that is woven deep into the skill set of every high rank player.

Working to improve map awareness in League of Legends is an activity that differentiates good players from the greats. So, if you also want to be featured in the latter category and keep rising among the LoL ranks, continue reading.

This guide is going to talk about some of the best ways to improve map awareness in League of Legends.

1. PLAYING UNLOCKED

In League of Legends, one of the primary ways to make your map awareness top-notch would be to use an unlocked camera. By default, the camera is locked, and most people never really bother to change it.

In our opinion, the unlocked camera is one of the most underused and underrated features of the game. It’s just a really great way of increasing your map awareness in League of Legends because it practically forces you to look around.

At first, learning how to use an unlocked camera can be quite difficult. It’ll probably take you about a dozen or so games to finally get used to this camera style, but once you do, you’ll notice your play style getting way more efficient.

Personally, the semi-locked camera mode is probably the best one. Semi Locked is when you keep switching between unlocked and locked during the game. When you’re in the early laning phase, switch to unlocked. And, when it’s time to fight, switch to locked to keep your focus on the fight and not click somewhere you shouldn’t.

2. PING SOUNDS

Ping sounds are the vital part of a game. While most of the players have it set to zero because of those annoying ping spamming kids that literally do nothing other than pinging on every ally champion in the game. But, map awareness in League of Legends and pings go hand in hand.

90% of the time, pings will be to warn you that there’s some incoming danger or if there’s trouble near you.

If you’re blocking pings, then you’re blocking your teammate from potentially saving you because in most cases, they won’t have time to type “You’re in trouble, there’s a gank coming from the south, run the other way”. Instead, they just ping the map and hope for the best.

This is a screenshot of my personal settings. As you can see, most of the sounds are set low. While, the ping volume is set to max. It can be annoying sometimes. But, it saves your life a couple of times each match.

3. Music and Map Awareness in League of Legends

Now, personally, I can’t really listen to songs when I’m playing because it just distracts me from the game and I engage too much into the song and don’t pay enough attention to the game.

I can fight and get last hits easily, but the map awareness in League of Legends really takes a spill when you’re listening to songs. The most crucial part is that you don’t hear pings very well. And, we have already established how you could screw up if you don’t hear the pings.

We aren’t telling you to completely sit in pin-drop silence while listening to music, you should just listen to something with not too many beats. This will keep the game enjoyable and not make you miss any important pings at the same time.

Here’s a link to something that I really like jamming to during my sessions. It’s a one-hour gaming mix by Respawnd and you should definitely give it a listen.

4. THE TREACHEROUS “SONG”

A few years ago, there was a Reddit thread asking about ways to improve map awareness in League of Legends and someone suggested this video.

So, basically, every time you hear the noise, you have to check the map. The old version of the video had a guy saying map over and over again. But, this version is much better because the noise is just really annoying and makes your skin crawl.

This is probably the best exercise if you just completely forget to look at the map.

5. USING EYE TRACKER FOR ANALYSIS

This isn’t really something that can help you improve map awareness in League of Legends, but it is something that can help you understand how important map awareness is.

There are a lot of streamers these days that are using eye trackers to help their viewers understand exactly where they’re looking. Player perspective is good, but eye tracker is one step ahead of that.

In this video by Bjergsen, you can see how he is implying the above tips and constantly glancing at the map every few seconds.

He also uses the unlocked camera as his main and has set pings at a really high volume. Bjergsen is doing it folks, maybe you should too.

6. MAP SIZES

Increasing map sizes in League of Legends is just sort of a formality. Even when the map is scaled to 100, it stays tiny. But, there’s a way to increase the map size beyond the 100 size.

This is my map and yes, it’s gigantic. But, in my experience, it’s really efficient. You might think that it blocks the screen, but if you’re using an unlocked camera, you won’t be getting that blind spot on your screen. So, I’ll explain step by step on how you can also make your map huge.

1. Find your League of Legends folder, normally located in C: drive.
2. Go into the Config folder, and you’ll see a file named PersistedSetting.
3. Right-click the file and click on Properties and set the attribute to Read-Only.
4. Now, double-click the file and keep scrolling till you find Minimap Scale.
5. Once you find it, it will probably have a number saying “1.0000”. Change it to “4.0000” or “5.0000”.
6. Save the file. Exit notepad and once again right click the PersistedSetting file and set the attribute to Read-Only.

And, don’t worry about the legality of these modifications. It’s not actually helping you in any way, you’re just zooming in your map. So, don’t worry about getting perma banned because of this slight change.

Closing Thoughts

Sure, some tips here will take some getting used to. But, these tips are something that you really can’t increase your ELO without. There comes a time when your skill set isn’t enough to get you the wins, you need to gain an advantage mechanically. And, if you want an ELO boost, these mechanics will get you just that.