Another professional Valorant tournament, and once again players complain about poor conditions. This time, Team Vitality player Nikita “Derke” Sirmitev addressed the organizers of VCT EMEA on his official social media and told them about the difficulties he faces on the stage.

Derke's message

In his official social media, Derke addressed the tournament organizers and his readers yesterday. It happened the day after the defeat by NAVI, as part of the last game week of the group stage at VCT 2025: EMEA Stage 1. The player said that for the third year in a row, professionals have been contacting Riot, but each time they receive only different excuses.

I am very disappointed with the problems in our region, as you can see from my previous answer. Many of the problems we are dealing with now have existed since the beginning of franchising. In the first year or two, we expressed concerns and were told to be patient. But now we are in the third year, and nothing seems to be improving.
Problems with equipment/monitors - I'll be honest: the equipment we play with could be much better. We've been complaining about the monitors for a long time now, and I honestly don't even know what the reason is, because every time we talk about it, we get different answers.

Derke also said that this time there were problems not only with the equipment itself, but also with the network. That's why the players had to play with a higher ping than they were used to at home.

The computers are not optimized, the settings are constantly changing, and most of the technical pauses are due to the fact that the game stutters a lot. IT specialists check it out, and if they see it or not, we just keep playing. There are no fixes.
This week we were told that we will be playing online on a 30-ping stage (I have 7 at home) to deal with performance issues and technical pauses. But that won't solve anything unless the underlying problem - the hardware - is addressed.

Finally, Derke once again emphasized the well-known information that computers for Valorant tournaments are primarily used for League of Legends tournaments. This is the main problem, because MOBA is much less demanding on hardware than a shooter.

To be honest, it's shocking to see that other regions have great computers and monitors, while in EMEA we're stuck with League of Legends setups. And when we raise the issue of performance, the answer is yes: But League of Legends doesn't have this problem

A few hours after Derke's appeal, another message appeared on the network, from a former professional player and now a streamer Tyson “TenZ” Ngo. He stated that he fully supported Derke's words and that he was really disappointed with Riot Games' inaction, and that was one of the reasons why he ended his career.

One of the biggest disappointments of getting to the Tier 1 scene is realizing that the best players and teams don't always get the best conditions to reach their highest potential. The most frustrating thing is not that this happened once, but that this problem has been recurring since the inception of the VCT scheme. It is completely unacceptable that after all this time we are still facing the same issues despite players constantly raising these issues that do not seem to be resolved. This was definitely one of the biggest factors leading to my decision to hang the mouse on a nail.

It should be noted that this is not the first time TenZ has complained about Riot's equipment. In the past, he also claimed that the PCs for Valorant tournaments are too weak and are used primarily for LOL. Read more about this in our material.

Nevertheless, like every previous complaint, another appeal from professional players was again left without comment from Riot, and the tournament organizers have not yet corrected their mistakes.