The two spots previously allocated to Chinese teams in the APAC VCT Last Chance Qualifier have now been redistributed to teams in Japan and Korea, according to an announcement from the VALORANT esports team on September 24.
The VALORANT esports team said the distribution of teams needed to be updated “due to logistical issues that have the potential to affect the overall competitive integrity of the tournament,” although it did not give specific reasons at the time. With this change, an additional team from both Japan and Korea will compete, which will be FENNEL (Japan) and DAMWON Gaming (Korea).
While the Last Chance Qualifier takes place online and the game has not yet been officially released in China, players and teams from China would have to compete using VPNs to compete on Hong Kong servers.
China was absent throughout the VALORANT Champions Tour as a whole, and the APAC Final Chance Qualifiers were supposed to be the region's first match in the official VCT game. Now, however, it seems that China won't be competing in any Riot official VALORANT events until 2022.
In addition to the reallocation of spots reserved for China, ZETA DIVISION (Japan) has chosen to withdraw from APAC LCQ and will be replaced by Northeption.
