Dedicated tournament servers and account region transfer are coming soon

On the tenth version of Ask VALORANT, we got to see how Riot Games are trying to combat smurf accounts who make the experience difficult for newer players, and the plans for setting up a Public Beta Environment client where you get to experiment with newer characters and maps before their release.

This time around, the studio revealed a number of upcoming features in the works. This includes the ability to view you and your friends’ playing hours, transferring accounts between region servers, and finally, setting up dedicated tournament servers.

Currently, VALORANT players lose all their progression and skins if they transfer their account to a different region. Although Riot Games’ League of Legends offers the ability to migrate to another region’s servers while keeping your skins and progression, VALORANT still doesn’t. This was acknowledged and will in fact be available for players towards the middle of next year.

“This is something we definitely know is important, and it’s on our list behind a couple of other critical priorities for VALORANT. We'd like it to be sooner, but it's looking like this option will be available towards the middle of 2021,” revealed Senior Producer Naoise Creaven.

Another major change coming to the competitive VALORANT scene is Tournament Realms, which Riot Games plan on setting up dedicated private servers for tournaments. This will allow tournaments to run on older patches, even if a newer one just dropped. Considering every patch includes agent and weapon tweaks, it can affect the meta drastically based on how much was changed. Naturally, teams and players would require time to experiment and even draw up new strategies or team compositions based on that.

We saw this happen during the First Strike North America - NSG Tournament - Open Qualifier, which Cloud9 eventually won, as members of the 100 Thieves roster were affected by unexpected bugs in the left-hand view model. Once again, this is similar to what is currently employed in the studio’s League of Legends tournaments, which indicates the team is definitely benefiting from the major success their MOBA has achieved over the years.

“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 patchline (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.”

“In the future, we'll have fully fleshed 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,” discussed VALORANT Esports Strategy Manager Riley Yurk.

What else would you like to see come to VALORANT in terms of content and features? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!