Valorant's African players rally for fair gaming: Plea to Riot for dedicated servers

With top-performing teams from practically every single region in the world competing in its esports league, VCT, and rising player counts in several different locations, which is unusual for most games, Valorant has grown to be one of the most widely played games in the world.

However, Africa, a continent historically underfunded by game publishers, has experienced server issues with Riot's IPs in the past. 

The fact that many African players are practically forced to play on extraordinarily high ping was once again brought up in a recent Reddit discussion started by a South African Valorant player.

There are no specifically designated servers for African Valorant, as the poster, 'Diligent-Sand-583' states. Instead, in order to have the lowest ping possible, players in the area are forced to connect to European and Middle Eastern servers like Bahrain, Istanbul, and Madrid. 

However, African gamers are compelled to play on a ping average of 160 milliseconds if they connect to those servers from Africa. 

As a player noted, Riot reduced the maximum server rewind from 200ms to 140ms in patch 6.02, which only served to aggravate the situation. This means that if your ping is higher than the average, there will be more performance problems, such as jerky gaming and inaccurate shots. 

Due to these problems, users have been requesting Riot to put up specific African servers for both League of Legends and Valorant for years. 

African League of Legends players have long requested African servers, as one commenter noted, even establishing an online petition. The nearest servers that African players can access are in the Middle East because Riot has never built up a dedicated server for the area. 

And because accounts are region-locked, African players cannot access Mumbai, one of the lower ping servers, unless they delete their account and use a VPN to create an Asia Pacific account to play in Mumbai.