Europe’s highest Valorant league has been plagued by technical problems for years. Now, a match day has even had to be canceled.
When technical problems disrupt the flow of the game in almost every round, something is seriously wrong. This was exactly the situation Team Liquid and Karmine Corp found themselves in on the last match day of the regular VCT EMEA season. After the first map, Riot Games pulled the plug and postponed the remaining matches.
It’s the escalation of a difficult season. The day before, Daniel Ringland, head of Valorant eSports in the EMEA region, had already apologized on X for the many technical breaks. He wrote that they wanted to fix the problems before the playoffs – now time is pressing more than ever.
‘Derke’ vents publicly
Ringland’s apology polarized social media, and the response from VCT veteran Nikita ‘Derke’ Sirmitev polarized it even more. In it, the player described how the problems have existed since the VCT EMEA was founded in 2021. Nothing has improved since then.
The main problem: the computers on which the league games are played were originally designed for League of Legends. This makes sense from Riot Games’ point of view, as LEC and VCT EMEA share an arena.
However, this means that the setups are not optimized for Valorant, explains ‘Derke’: “Settings are constantly changing and most technical breaks are due to persistent, severe lag. IT then checks this. And whether they find anything or not, we just keep playing. No adjustments.”
Riot Games’ attempts to solve the problem have so far proved unsuccessful. Some games in the arena were even played on an online server, but latency issues caused additional delays, Ringland admitted.
A player council to gather criticism
On X, ‘Derke’ received support from other eSports players. Other complaints he made about the VCT schedule and communication with Riot Games also met with approval.
In order to be able to respond better to such criticism in the future, Riot Games wants to establish a player council. ‘Derke’ sees this as an opportunity – despite the lack of solutions in the past. However, the pro says he currently still has to use X to make his voice heard.
