Yesterday I tried playing League of Legends Wild Rift on my iPad 2018 (9.7-inch) tablet.
The experience was way more fun than playing it on my phone. It’s much more immersive when the characters are larger, and overall the experience was overwhelming compared to playing it on my OnePlus 6 smartphone.
However, there is a problem, a BIG PROBLEM. The visible area is shrunk because of the more squarish aspect ratio of the tablet (4:3). This means that you see less of the visible area, which leads to a competitive disadvantage. In other words, an enemy can see you but you wouldn’t be able to see the enemy in certain situations. More precisely, when enemies come from the sides in most part.
I create an image and a video to illustrate the issue more accurately.
Here is a video I made about it.
So you can see where the problem lies. When you are playing with a tablet that has a more square-ish aspect ratio, not a widescreen–a large part of the sides is not visible to you, while a player playing with a widescreen phone or tablet can see you.
Visibility is one of the most important aspects of the game, allowing you to detect enemy location, send alerts to teammates, and communicate moves to defends or attack. Detecting an enemy alongside other hint cues can give the team a good idea of where enemies are and what is their next move. MOBA, especially in competitive scenes of League of Legends is all about communication and proper positioning of your character.
Developer Answered my Question on Reddit
The devs from Riot did respond to my post on Reddit and I quote their answers:
We are improving this on iPad in an upcoming patch. It will roughly split the difference between current tablet and phone viewing space. So you’ll get a bit more vertical view of the map than phones, but a bit less horizontally than phones (significantly more horizontally than current tablets, though)
Source: Riot team via Reddit
They also mentioned that they have tried different options like pushing the game space to the top and having the controls in the unused space at the bottom, but it leads to an uncomfortable control experience.
They didn’t want to add black bars on top and bottom as it makes controls hard to reach.
It’s good that the developers are working on a solution that will be available but we based on their answers, not many people have tablets. I guess they mean that not many people play the game on tablets and I’m sure they have the analytics to support this claim.
They are—Riot Devs, committed and I quote: “continually improving the game for all players!”.
I still think that a competitive game like this should have the same visible area for all players but apparently this is an issue.
I suggested maybe having dynamic controls, allowing players to customize the positioning of the controls manually in the settings.
Anyway, now you understand why Wild Rift has an issue running on certain tablets with screens in different aspect ratios and how it can lead to a competitive advantage or disadvantage.