Riot is planning to create dedicated tournament servers for Valorant

Unlike League of Legends, the other Riot Games IP, Valorant is yet to have its dedicated tournament servers.

And the lack of these servers has given way to various issues during both competitive games as well as standard matchmaking.

Recently, Riot had to roll back the Valorant 1.11 patch as soon as it was deployed, as the update came with a variety of game-breaking bugs that made the shooter unplayable. To make matters worse, it was dropped right when the NSG First Strike qualifiers were on their way, and continuing with the patch would have been a nightmare for the game’s competitive integrity.

League of Legends, on the other hand, has its dedicated tournament servers. Even if a patch drops in the middle of a LEC or an LCK split, the players don’t play on the latest versions till the patch is thoroughly tested for competitive play.

The gamers still play in the previous update, and any new changes take at least a week to go live in tournaments.

Similarly, Valorant is in dire need of a dedicated tournament server, so that patch rollbacks don’t keep happening. And it would seem that Riot is working on creating one in the coming months.

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Valorant to receive dedicated tournament servers in coming updates

Image via Riot Games

In the recent Ask Valorant-Nov. 19, the Riot devs opened up about how a dedicated tournament server would be coming to the shooter shortly.

When answering the question, “Have you thought about having certain patches for tournaments exist on their own servers?”, Riley Yurk, Manager and Valorant Esport Strategist, said:

“Tournament realms (basically, a private server) are something we’re actively pursuing and are coming soon™. For First Strike, we were only planning to use a separate patch line (consider this Tournament Realm-lite) for the main event but ended up launching this early to allow tournaments to continue on the same patch they started on.”

“This has allowed us to keep esports on a separate patch from live and is something we’re bringing back globally for the First Strike main event Dec. 3–6.”

It’s true that Valorant’s esports scene has not fully taken off, and Riot is still banking on third-party organizers to select teams for its first official tournament, First Strike.

Yurk continued:

“In the future, we’ll have fully flushed out Tournament Realms that will give us even more control over the environment that esports is played on. We’ll have specific rules around what patches can be used for certain tournaments to help create the best environment for competitive play.”

“We’re extremely focused on competitive integrity and will continue to adapt our plans in collaboration with both devs and players.”

In the latest Ask Valorant blog, the Riot devs have gone over many changes that the shooter will see in the upcoming updates. And fans should be quite excited with the plans that the devs have for the game.