Since the dawn of Riot’s tactical shooter Valorant, players from South Asia were left with no other option than to play the game with considerably high pings due to the nearest official servers being located in South-East Asia.
This went against Riot’s initial promise of letting players enjoy the game at latencies as low as 35 ms, which led many players from South Asia and the Middle East to quit Valorant due to their pings being too high. However, it appears like the days of high latencies are numbered, as Indian and Middle Eastern Valorant servers may be nearer than you think.
The initial announcement of Indian Valorant servers came within two days of the official release of the game. “Riot Games is highly committed to providing the India and rest of the South Asia region with excellent gaming experience,” Sukamal Pegu, Valorant Publishing Head of South Asia, said in a statement. “While you’ll be joining the worldwide launch on June 2, the official servers which will support the Middle East & South Asia will come later in the year.”
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Months later, on September 15th, data miners found out strings in the game files which directly hinted to Indian and Middle Eastern servers being in works. The set of strings and URLs found by the data miner included, “Frankfurt, Mexico City, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), Bahrain, Mumbai.”
From the leaks, it appeared like the servers for India and the Middle East would be situated in Mumbai and Bahrain respectively.
Only a few weeks after the strings were uncovered, Indian Valorant players started experiencing extremely low latencies when playing custom games which were highly unusual.
The devs later confirmed that they were running “small scale tests” on Indian servers which caused the ping fluctuations. “We’re basically making sure our connections and routing with main ISPs are working correctly,” a Riot dev said on Reddit. “Today’s showed some player isp’s routing people through Singapore and then back to Mumbai, for example–not great for the ping. We’re getting closer and will have a firm live date soon.”
With the Act 3 of Riot’s shooter coming this October 13th, there’s a high probability that Indian Valorant servers will go live alongside it. The upcoming servers being introduced to Mumbai will provide players across South Asia with low pings and consequently a better gameplay experience.
Also Read | VALORANT Act 3 – what to expect from the next Battlepass
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