Valorant players beg Riot to add African servers amid high ping issues
Riot GamesValorant players are begging Riot to add African servers to their games as players from the region are facing high ping issues due to connections to faraway servers.
Valorant has become one of the most globally popular games, with its esports league, VCT, seeing top-performing teams from almost every single region in the world, and rising player numbers in various different regions. Which is a rarity for most games.
However, one region that has been historically underserved by game publishers, Africa, has had historic server problems with Riot’s IPs.
This is what a recent Reddit thread created by a South African Valorant player brought up once again, as many African players are essentially forced to play on incredibly high ping.
As the poster, ‘Diligent-Sand-583’, says, there are no dedicated African Valorant servers. Rather, players in the region are made to connect to European and Middle Eastern servers like Bahrain, Istanbul and Madrid to have the lowest ping possible.
However, playing in those servers from Africa would mean that African players are forced to play on a ping average of 160 milliseconds.
To add salt to the wound, as pointed out by the player, in patch 6.02, Riot added a maximum server rewind from 200ms to 140ms. This means if you are playing on average ping above it, there will be increased performance issues, such as laggy gameplay and shots being inaccurate.
Riot gamesBecause of these issues, players have been asking Riot for years to set up dedicated African servers not just for Valorant but also League of Legends.
As a commenter pointed out, African LoL players have asked for African servers for years, even starting up an online petition. However, Riot has never set up a dedicated server for the region, and the closest servers African players can access are in the Middle East.
And due to the region locking of accounts, one of the lower ping servers for African players, Mumbai, is inaccessible unless they abandon their account and use a VPN to create an Asia Pacific account to play in Mumbai.