If you were wondering what those annoying tech pauses were for during T1’s game against DRG in VCT Champions Paris yesterday, pro VALORANT player Meteor has the answer—and it’s unsurprisingly related to the “good old EMEA PCs.”
Following the series on Sept. 14, Meteor—who played in the VALORANT series—revealed that the tech pauses were because his PC wasn’t working as it was supposed to be. “With the LOTUS pause issue, I kept saying that my PC was lagging, so we called a pause, but the tournament staff told me to just keep playing with the FPS stats on during Set 1. I could feel my PC cutting out constantly, but they still said to play. So we paused, restarted the game once, and it seemed fine after that,” he explained in a live stream on SOOP—translated by a fan on Reddit.
While Meteor’s situation was no small matter, it was resolved more quickly than what caused the second tech pause. “The second tech pause was when T1’s Dongho (DH) suddenly crashed in the middle of a round,” Meteor revealed, before talking about what had happened in detail. “It was Demon1 left on their side, and we had three players alive, but suddenly Dongho’s screen turned blue. He rebooted and tried to log back in, but login just wouldn’t work.”
The tech team was eventually forced to change Dongho’s PC, but even the new machine threw error codes and crashed multiple times. After several tries, Dongho was able to log into the client, but his game began lagging like Meteor instead. “So we kept pausing after every round… It was just tough. Couldn’t focus at all. The PCs just kept cutting out!” Meteor explained.
The drama raises questions about Riot’s ability to manage a high-stakes tournament of Champions’ stature and reignites discussion about the persistent PC issues that have plagued VCT EMEA since the season began. And this is even after Riot took multiple steps to upgrade problematic hardware and fix infrastructural defects back during Stage One in April 2025.
Interestingly, according to translated remarks from his stream, Meteor claimed that Riot has set up “old PCs” for VALORANT Champions Paris. So, players apparently have to make do with 240 Hz monitors and poor specs at what’s supposed to be the biggest VCT tournament of the year. What’s worse is that Riot had already upgraded to new PCs for the EMEA experience, only to then downgrade for Champions. Apparently, Riot doesn’t use the same PCs from regional tournaments in global events—but in this case, it should have, since the regional setups were clearly far better than their “global fleet.”
Riot has yet to comment on the situation, but fans and players are furious about the quality of production EMEA has delivered in the last couple of years. Other VCT regions are not perfect, but their issues aren’t as prominent as EMEA’s.
VALORANT Champions Paris is still in its initial stages, with much of the group stage and entire playoffs ahead. Hopefully, things remain stable moving forward and participating so teams can focus on their matches.
Published: Sep 15, 2025 08:51 am