South Africa will have its own Valorant servers, finally
Players in South Africa can finally play Valorant with a decent ping.
Riot has confirmed that Valorant will soon have dedicated servers for the player base in South Africa, a community that was overlooked for more than two years. However, the developer has now rectified the issue by making exclusive servers official.
Valorant’s executive producer Anna Donlon broke the big news on X, confirming that Riot is working on exclusive servers for South Africa.
“Hello, South Africa!! We know it’s been a long wait, but the time has finally come to bring local servers your way! More info coming soon,” Anna said.
Valorant will soon have South African servers
While South African players were already playing Valorant in unsuitable conditions, rocking 200ms and sometimes higher pings in nearby servers, patch 6.02 made things worse for them. In the patch, Riot announced that players over 140ms would experience hit registration inaccuracy, meaning anyone playing on a different region’s server out of necessity would suffer for it.
Since South African players use Bahrain servers as the closest location, they ultimately took a hit. Now, Riot is making things easier for all parties involved, the Bahrain community for dealing with high ping players and the South African community for suffering a competitive disadvantage.
Partnering with Carry1st, the developer is soon bringing in exclusive servers for South Africa.
This is great news for aspiring pros who couldn’t compete in favorable circumstances due to ping disadvantage. The local servers would open doors for fresh talent and allow casual players to play Valorant in peace.
The exact timing for the addition of servers to Valorant remains uncertain. However, the mere fact that Riot is actively working on them brings satisfaction to the South African player base. It won’t be long before Riot officially introduces local servers to cater to the African community.
Fariha Bhatti is a long-time gaming writer who loves competitive FPS games and slots with particularly fun themes. She got her start playing classic games developed by SNK, from legendary fighting game series The King of Fighters to challenging platform franchise Metal Slug. She now spends most of her time playing Valorant and Counter-Strike 2 while working her way through new slot releases to find her next favorite. Fariha has been published at PCGamesN, TalkEsport and ONE Esports.
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