African VALORANT players prompt new requests for local servers amid worsening ping problems

CNBC estimates that by 2024, the gaming industry in Africa will generate more than $1 billion in revenue, making it one of the most promising and rapidly expanding gaming markets in the world.

At Champions 2023, all VALORANT agents but one has already been played, Credit: Valorant
By Shubham Dalal | Jul 27, 2023 | 3 Min Read follow icon Follow Us

The servers for VALORANT are currently spread out across six popular regions in the world, allowing players to remain in their own cultural comfort zones. However, despite having a commendable population of gamers, a sizable portion of the world is missing out on the benefits of dedicated servers for Riot Games’ tactical shooter.

On July 26, a South African VALORANT player by the name of Diligent-Sand-583 revived an old debate by posting on Reddit about how the lack of African-specific servers in the game affects their gameplay. If you need more information about African VALORANT players prompt new requests for local servers amid worsening ping problems, then read carefully, and don’t forget to share with your friends.

African VALORANT players prompt new requests for local servers amid worsening ping problems:

Diligent-Sand-583 claimed that despite being able to connect to European and Middle Eastern servers in Bahrain, Istanbul, Madrid, and other locations, they are constrained to play with an average ping of 160 milliseconds because of the distance between their location and the servers. On high internet ping, competitive shooters can obviously seem unplayable and incredibly frustrating.

Read More In League of Legends Project L, what does the Fuse system do?

To make matters worse, Riot reduced the maximum server rewind to 140 milliseconds (from 200) in Patch 6.02, which, despite being added to lessen the “impact of networking conditions on gameplay,” increased performance issues (laggy gameplay, more hit registration inaccuracy, and other things) for those playing VALORANT on higher-than-normal pings. Naturally, players want Riot to launch African-specific servers so they can play with lower ping, shorter hit registration delays, and better performance.

Riot probably has a reason for delaying the process, even though setting up servers might not seem like a big deal. For years, players in VALORANT have asked for African servers, and one player claims that if the business had been successful, it would have responded by now.

The fact that Riot relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide dedicated game servers across the globe and that the majority of African nations don’t yet support the cloud platform was also brought up by many players. Some players suggested switching to Asia-Pacific servers like Mumbai to get lower ping than Bahrain servers, but doing so will only cover up the real issue for a short while. A new account must be created in order to play on a different server because Riot accounts are region-locked.

CNBC estimates that by 2024, the gaming industry in Africa will generate more than $1 billion in revenue, making it one of the most promising and rapidly expanding gaming markets in the world. The PC and console player bases are also sizable, even though the mobile gaming sector can be blamed for the majority of the market’s growth. However, the region receives little to no support in terms of local servers for online multiplayer games like CS:GO, League of Legends, Apex Legends, Overwatch, and more.

Being denied a chance to showcase their talents and enjoy a game is truly demoralizing for dedicated players. Whatever the case, it is impossible to ignore the obstacles that the continent’s gaming industry faces, such as the poor internet infrastructure, the lack of developer protection rights, the lack of industry infrastructure, and more. We’ll have to wait and see if Riot makes additional efforts to win over the African VALORANT community.

Get the latest from Sportslumo.com by following us on InstagramTwitter, and YouTube