Valorant pros take a dig at NA’s regional priority for patches, Zeigler responds

Riot Games takes a rather odd approach when it comes to releasing patches for Valorant (Image Credits: Riot Games)

To those unaware, Riot Games employs a rather staggering approach when it comes to releasing patches for their titles including Valorant, League of Legends and even Legends of Runeterra.

The devs don’t choose to release the patches for each server at the same time as the content for each region needs to be filtered to be region-specific. What this means is that there will be some countries who will get the patch before the others. However, North America seems to be the region of choice for all of the games, even Valorant.

This creates a regional Twitch-viewership disparity every time a new patch hits. As NA is the first one to get it, every single Valorant player from all over the world will be tuning into NA’s Twitch streams to see what the new changes look like.

This viewership disparity during new patch days is quite frustrating for streamers and Valorant social media influencers in other regions, and a lot of Valorant professionals have recently spoken up about it.

Valorant pros raise their voices over ‘priority’ patch timings

Lucas Rojo, the coach of Team Wygers, in one of his recent tweets, went into a discussion with Valorant’s game director, Joe Ziegler and questioned why new patches have a “priority towards North America.”

This actually isn’t intended to be priority in terms of access. This is more in the realm of “if it breaks in our backyard it’s easier to fix here before it spreads to the rest of the world.”

— Ziegler (@RiotZiegler) August 5, 2020

Ziegler responded by saying that the reason Riot Games puts patches out in NA first is not because of any regional priority motive. He explains:

“This actually isn’t intended to be priority in terms of access. This is more in the realm of 'if it breaks in our backyard it’s easier to fix here before it spreads to the rest of the world'.”

However, Lucas Rojo was not the only one with the concern. G2 Esports’ Oscar ‘Mixwell’ Cañellas also took to the platform to talk about the negative impact that path priority is having on the viewership of the region.

It's kinda annoying that NA gets to try first every update, streamers and content creators benefit so much because all the regions have to watch them.

— G2 m1xwell (@Mixwell) August 5, 2020

Even with all the concerns raised, we don't feel that Riot Games will be changing their patch release methods anytime soon, and NA will always be the first ones to take a bite of the new patch cake every two weeks.