The Struggle of a Rubbish African Gamer
Now I am not to sure about you guys, but I do enjoy video games, it is one of the few things that bring peace and balance to me in this world, that is when people are not being toxic towards me or my friends, and it is only fairly recently that I have ventured into the realms of the online gaming scene.
Most of my young life was filled with playing offline games on PS2 and 3 you FIFA, Madden, NBA 2k, Street fighter, MK, Tekken, Burnout and so on, as you would expect I did not have a lot of options playing online games in Malawi at the time the internet connectivity was poor to nonexistent. In the year 2016, however, I came across the trailer of a game called Overwatch and was really excited, only to find out I could get the cracked version on PC (the only time I ever attempted to get a cracked version) and would always wonder why I could not play this game. And then in 2020 someone decided to eat a bat and I was forced to be at home all the time and it was during this time I discovered a game called Project A, better known now as Valorant, and it was my first experience in online multiplayer FPS action, and a turning point in my life.
In 2021 as I was playing Valorant, I got reminded that the game of Overwatch exists and not only that it was an online FPS and so I went to Blizzard.com looked it up and saw it was $20 to which I decided was too rich for my blood and that i would wait for the next promotion or sale, but I am an impulsive creature of habit who lacks patience and ended up buying the game very shortly afterwards (I regret nothing) and thus in may of 2021, five years after its initial release, I finally had the Overwatch I so craved.
Now in playing Valorant and Overwatch I noticed a trend, I suck at FPS, but that’s not too important, I just wanted it out here, the true trend was the monumentally high ping which plagues the African servers. You see, in both games us African lads are flung to EU servers by default, in which the best ping I have ever consistently gotten is a 190ms (mainly due to our ISP being dog water awful) and my friends and I would find ourselves in situations where our teammates are hounding us for bad ping which is not our fault at all (I have 5x worse ping than you and we are the same rank, its time to start looking at yourself jerk) and not only bad ping, there was also this devil known as packet loss in which you think you one tapped that stupid lurking Reyna at mid but in fact you didn’t fire at all and that also translates to a game where I have foolishly decided too main Hanzo.
Now you might ask, “Why don’t you just play games with African server?” And they do exist, such as CSGO and Rainbow Six Siege, problem is that I hate both games, they feel slow and cumbersome and in essence, they kinda harder than the two FPS I main and am already not good at, all I am calli g for is some consideration from Riot and Blizzard especially with the launch of Overwatch 2 which is coming up, and i cant just abandon the games, Overwatch wasn’t free and I do like my skin collection in my EU account. Above all that, its the friendships that I have made during the 2 years Valorant has been out which really makes it harder to part, moving to the States Valorant has been one of the best ways for m to continue spending time with my people back home and its really tough being on stable internet while watching your friends struggle.
Ultimately, what is the point of what I have just written? A plea to get better servers from Africa? Maybe a plea to the EU scene to take it easy on us from African ping? All of the above would be fine just as long as we also acknowledge that on a personal level i am also plagued by a computer that gives me a max of 60 frames, aim of Stevie Wonder and the corrective reflex a chimpanzee on 10 cups of coffee. But here is looking to the future of gaming.