After weeks of technical issues, pauses, and broadcast interruptions, Fnatic's Nikita "Derke" Sirmitev took to Twitter to air his grievances with the subpar PC setups at the Riot Games Arena in Berlin. This week, a match between FUT and BBL saw a 30-minute pause. Today, the first map between KC and TL took three hours. Constant hardware issues came to a head this week, with Derke explaining that games would be played online — with 30 ping — at the arena.

After Derke's allegations, several top players and coaches came to his support, including NAVI's Kyrylo "ANGE1" Karasov, Gentle Mates' Maks "kamyk" Rychlewski, and Karmine Corp's Ahmed "ZE1SH" Sheikh. Most notably, retired icon Tyson "TenZ" Ngo cited consistent technical issues as a primary reason for his retirement, reaffirming that he'd been hearing "horror stories" about EMEA setups for years.

VCT EMEA, like VCT Americas, is played in the same Riot Games Arena venue as its League of Legends counterpart. Unlike in NA, however, the LEC matches (held Saturday through Monday) don't overlap with VCT matches, which are held Wednesday through Friday every week. Derke cited the lack of a crowd on Wednesdays — ostensibly a cost-cutting measure for games in the middle of the week — as one of his issues with the current league structure.

As Riot re-evaluates its competitive structure in Europe, several options come to mind. Both the LEC and VCT EMEA have outgrown the relatively small crowd capacity offered by the Riot Games Arena in Berlin, and the roadshows — like this week's regular-season trip to Madrid — are supposed to assuage that. For both titles to grow, they need space; without breathing room, VALORANT and League of Legends will suffocate in the West.