VALORANT’s servers are currently hosted across six happening regions worldwide, letting players stay in their cultural comfort zone. But despite nurturing a commendable gamer population, one significant region is missing out on the advantages of dedicated servers in Riot Games’ tactical shooter.
Stirring a buried discussion yet again on July 26, a South African VALORANT player named Diligent-Sand-583 shared on Reddit how the absence of local African servers in the game affects their experience.
While they can connect to European and Middle Eastern servers like Bahrain, Istanbul, Madrid, and more, Diligent-Sand-583 said they are being forced to play on an average ping of 160 milliseconds due to the distance between their location and the servers. Needless to say, competitive shooters can seem unplayable and incredibly frustrating on high internet ping.
Related: How to fix high ping in VALORANT
To make things worse, Riot capped the maximum server rewind to 140 milliseconds (down from 200) in Patch 6.02, which, although it was added to reduce the “impact of networking conditions on gameplay,” increased performance hiccups (laggy gameplay, more hit registration inaccuracy, and whatnot) for those playing VALORANT on pings higher than usual.
Naturally, players want Riot to establish local African servers, which will let them play on lower ping, reduce hit registration delays, and avoid performance issues.
While setting up servers may not seem like much of a task, Riot probably has a reason for withholding the process. Players have been requesting African servers in VALORANT for years, and according to one player, the company should have done something by now had it been profitable.
Many players also pointed out that Riot depends on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer dedicated game servers worldwide, and most African countries don’t support the cloud platform yet.
Some players recommended switching to Asia-Pacific servers like Mumbai to get better ping than Bahrain servers, but it’ll just temporarily mask the real problem. Plus, Riot accounts are region locked, so you’ll have to create a new account to play on a different server.
Africa boasts one of the world’s most promising and fastest-growing gaming markets, with CNBC predicting its revenue generation to be over $1 billion by 2024. Although most of the market’s growth can be attributed to the mobile gaming industry, the PC and console player base is formidable too. Yet the region receives little to no love in online multiplayer titles like CS:GO, League of Legends, Apex Legends, Overwatch, and more such titles—in terms of local servers.
It’s honestly disheartening to see passionate players get denied a platform to prove their skills and enjoy playing a game. Be that as it may, one cannot deny the limitations plaguing the continent’s gaming scene, including the lack of quality internet infrastructure, developer protection rights, industry infrastructure, and more.
Whether Riot invests extra effort to please the African VALORANT community is something we’ll have to wait and watch.
Dot Esports reached out to Riot for comment but didn’t receive a reply at the time of publishing.
