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Valorant players have been complaining about the blatant and vulgar toxicity plaguing the SA Mumbai server since launch.
Valorant gained immense popularity in the Indian sub-continent region from Day 1. Considering the tremendous response, Riot Games launched a Mumbai-based server for the SA region in October 2020.
However, toxicity has been prevalent and growing within the player base since then. Unfortunately, name-calling, vulgar language, and insulting family members are all but common in every other match on the server.
Be it ranked or unranked matches, toxicity is ruining every Valorant player's experience. A certain portion of the Indian sub-continent player base has abandoned the Mumbai server, despite lower ping, just to avoid toxicity in-game.
Valorant SA Mumbai server
Valorant gained the interest of the Indian audience with the closed beta period. Many gamers utilized VPN's to get closed beta keys of the NA region from Twitch drops.
On launch, Valorant shot up to become one of the most played esports games in India. The low specs requirement and free-to-play model, along with an easy to pick up yet hard to master gameplay, was an instant hit within the community.
After its launch in June 2020, Indian fans stated requesting an Indian server. Riot officially launched the Mumbai SA server on October 14th. There were some latency issues, with players of certain ISPs getting far greater ping than expected.
Since its launch, toxicity has plagued the server, as a vocal percentage of players are ruining matches for everyone else. Many gamers have even abandoned this server, opting for the relatively higher pinged Singapore SA servers just to avoid toxicity.
A Redditor, u/Shockwave_7227, recently described his experience with toxicity in the Mumbai SA server:
"Once, we matched with three other toxic players, that day was pretty bad for my friend, so he was playing pretty badly, so he was last. Note that this was unrated. Since I was relatively new to the game, I couldn't understand a few things like '1 in the shower', etc. So when I died because of that, they were so annoyed and kept calling me and my friend 'noobda,' 'mc,' 'g***du.' Also, I was 2nd in number of kills. Despite this, the people below me were still calling me a noob (I was two kills under team MVP and five kills above the person who was 3rd). From that moment on, my friend just decided to disable voice chat for himself."
One other significant barrier is the language difference. India is a diverse country with over 20 official languages. Even though Hindi is the most common language, not everyone is comfortable speaking it.
u/Shockwave_7227 mentioned:
"Everyone just assumes you know Hindi. I understand Hindi, but I don't speak it very well. Another time, two toxic players were calling another player noobda and some s**t. He was Tamil, so he didn't understand what the hell they were even saying. So please be sensitive to other people."
Riot launched the SA Mumbai Valorant servers to bring together players across the Indian sub-continent. Unfortunately, such negativity is dividing the fanbase.
The developers recently promised to incorporate a Ranked matchmaking ban for chat and voice banned players in future patches. Hopefully, Riot can reduce toxicity, and all players can enjoy Valorant together.
