Are Valorant accounts region-locked? Answered

gamepur.com:

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.

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.

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 in 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.

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.