With Valorant players from India complaining for long about latency problems with South-east Asian (SEA) servers, Riot Games is seemingly testing Indian servers that promise to offer ping times less than 35ms. In a Reddit post on Friday, a Redditor (u/ArmiesofZNight) who identifies as a Valorant developer, said that the company will be testing its upcoming servers in India over the next couple of weeks before officially switching them on for everyone.
According to the poster: “…these (India servers) are not fully live just yet. We’re doing some small scale tests over the next couple weeks, so you may see it pop in and out of availability. We’re basically making sure our connections and routing with main ISPs are working correctly. Today’s showed some player isp’s routing people through Singapore and then back to Mumbai, for example – not great for ping. We’re getting closer and will have a firm live date soon”.
Data miners originally found hidden strings about Valorant’s India servers following an update on September 16. While Riot did not confirm the developments back then, the company is believed to be testing the new servers in Mumbai at least since earlier in the week. While they have only been online intermittently over the past week, reports suggest that they have been offering significantly lower latency than the current SEA servers.
As things stand now, most players in India are connected to Riot’s servers in Singapore or Hong Kong, leading to high ping times and a frustrating gaming experience. The availability of the Mumbai servers is likely to solve that problem for Valorant players in the country. Meanwhile, Riot is also setting up new servers in the Middle East for players in that part of the world. Valorant servers in Bahrain and the company’s website in Arabic are also believed to be currently in testing and, should go live in a couple of weeks alongside the Indian servers.
