While playing Valorant, you may find yourself experiencing lag, or unable to play with the people you want to. This can be understandably frustrating, but sometimes the issue isn’t so much a technical one as it is a geographical one. If you’ve ever wondered if Valorant’s accounts are region-locked, read on.
Are Valorant accounts region-locked?
The short answer is yes, your Valorant account is locked to a particular geographical region. Depending on where in the world you were when you created your Riot Games account (or where the system thought you were if you were using a VPN), your account gets tied to a particular Region of Residence, as well as a “shard,” which is essentially the collection of servers on which you can play. Riot has six shards at present: Southeast Asia/Asia Pacific, Europe, Korea, Brazil, Latin America, and North America.
Related: How to hide your name in Valorant
Your Region of Residence dictates what currency options you can see as well as things like your default language. Your shard establishes which servers you can play on — as a result, it has a big effect on things like lag, if you can’t connect to a server near to you, and whether or not you can play on the same server as your friends. So if you’ve moved to a new country recently and things don’t seem to be working quite as well, it could well be down to that. Luckily, there are solutions available.
Can you transfer your account to a different region?
Transferring to a new region
For a long while, it was pretty difficult, if not impossible, to sort out a region transfer for your Riot account. Luckily, that’s no longer the case, and region transfers can now be done through the Riot Games website. Simply head to this page and log in to your account, and you can see if you’re eligible. If you run into any issues — for example, the site might not see you as eligible if you’re using a VPN that makes it look like you’re in a different region — then you can submit a support ticket directly to Riot to hopefully get to the bottom of the issue.
Which regions can be transferred to?
Riot states on its website that the system can handle a transfer to almost any other region, but there are a few caveats:
- Players in the South Korea region cannot transfer to the Japan region
- Players who are not in South Korea but would like their region to be changed to South Korea will need to create a new account in the region
- Anyone wanting to change their region to Vietnam must be a permanent resident in Vietnam
- Shard changes are only done when changing region
What will transfer to your new region?
If you submit for a region transfer, you’ll thankfully retain the majority of your game data. There are a few things that won’t transfer, though — here’s the breakdown:
What does transfer
- Collection (Skins, Player Cards, Buddies, Sprays)
- Characters
- Mission/Contract/BattlePass Progress
- Loadout
- MMR
- Shard Affinity
- Previous Season’s Rank Rewards
What doesn’t transfer
- Current Ranked Season Data (you’ll have to restart the current season)
- Purchase History
- Match History
NB: When transferring between the North America, Latin America, and Brazil shards, all data — including current season data, purchase history, and match history — is transferred.
