Oh yeah and by the way, before going in to Japanese premier zone, i did ask Riot about if we could play in it and qualify into further tournaments. They basically said yes. I wrote a ticket. ( screenshot on my twitter acc https://x.com/consz9 )

My question: "Hello! We are a team residing in Mongolia and we were wondering if we could compete in Japan's Premier Zone (Contender League) and advance to Promotion/Relegation Tournament on august. We think that there might be a zone restriction because we're Mongolians. We have no issue playing on Tokyo servers. (we have 60-70ms which is optimal for us) Thank You!"

Their answer: Hello there,

Thanks for reaching out ot us!

You see, the choice of servers depends on your shard, and all possible servers are listed in the list of zones that are available for selection during the creation of the command.

And if this or that server is not on your shard, then selecting it will not work, there is no error.

Shard is the name of a specific set of servers, depending on your region.

I hope I have made this clear, but if you still have questions, let me know!

sure buddy

Hi. Player from The MongolZ here. I currently feel like shit right now because we've spent 6 months of intense practice hoping to get into whatever Challengers League we can get into through Premier.

Firstly we did try HK & TW before but the circuit point system seemed unfair. There is absolutely no way to qualify into VCT Ascension through hk tw premier. Asian Premier sends us to HK TW Split 2 Promo/Relo where we fight for a slot in Split 2 and an additional 15 circuit points. Even if we get the 15 circuit points, teams coming in from hk tw split 1 already has a minimum of 30-40 points. So if we win promo/relo and split 2 there is absolutely no way of qualifying to ascension because of the circuit points system.

That's why we decided to go into VCJ because they have no circuit points system, only one winner goes to VCT Ascension. (Keep in mind we have 60-65ms to HK, 65-70 ms to Tokyo which is not that much of a difference for us). We won EP8A3 Premier (Contender League) and EP9A1 (Invite Division). Each qualifies the top 4 teams into VCJ Split 3 Advance Stage Phase 1 (total of 8).
As of now we haven't received any emails regarding the qualification notice from riot so we got worried and asked other qualified team players if they had received an email or not. They've already had received the email. To my understanding the main thing that stopped us from getting invited was the rule that says Japan Challengers teams must have 3/5 Japanese residents in order to compete. But the main thing is we qualified through VALORANT Premier. Twice. Also there was a Mongolian Team (Kobolds) that was able to play in the hk tw challengers through premier. Keep in mind that HK & TW and Japan has the same 3/5 players rule.

This is totally unfair and we've worked hard for this. We're not just some random 5 players playing for fun. We are an organization and we're all signed players trying our best to represent Mongolia. Idk why Riot is treating us like this. I thought VALORANT Challengers rule did not apply to teams advancing from VALORANT Premier.

And for some random reason our official slot is in Valorant Turkiye (where we have 150ms).