"Ranked Matchmaking will no longer be available in South Africa, India, and Dubai. We will update these servers as the unranked populations in these regions grow to the critical mass needed to be able to support splitting the user base into Ranked and Unranked queues.

While there are some players that used these servers for Ranked, the low populations made them prime targets for various Ranked Matchmaking abuses. For the time being, players in these regions will need to join Ranked Matchmaking queues in one of the other nearby supported servers."

This is troubling as it may never return hopefully there is a solution in the future for this as players from the South African region will be at a heavy handicap trying to play in other regions for ranked matches.

We struggled to get South African servers for DotA 2 it's really sad to see us lose something so important to the game.

I hope the competitive spirit can continue whether it be through scrimmages or locally hosted tournaments, these are dark times indeed but I'm sure we will survive as South Africans always do!