I used to do this earlier in development just to play with my friends in SA, we would select NA region and have ~100ms ping for all of us, instead of a disparity of ~40ms and +200ms.
I don't think it's broken or needs a fix, I always supposed devs disabled this cvar on purpose so players wouldn't go in another region and mess with the rankings or something like that, maybe matchmaking/queuing issue, but I don't really know. I believe CS2 has this same measure.
There are still ways of forcing the region, but I don't think that should be discussed publicly if Valve intentionally disabled this feature.
Although I want to share some experiences and give feedback in this thread about this matter:
-Creating a lobby with friends from another region (EU - SA, EU - NA) will put us in one of our local regions for the hideout, so one of the players have local ping (<50ms) and the others have an insane amount of ping (>200ms)
-When we go into a game, it will frequently put us in a server that doesn't favour the majority nor average of players in a party, with the majority of our pings going up to 150ms/200ms and some going 20ms/40ms, sometimes the other way around, majority of low ping, minority of super high ping.
Clarifying with some examples:
3 EU players + 1 SA player, the game put us in a match hosted in Lima, São Paulo, Buenos Aires...
Half of the team is playing on +200ms, half of the team is playing with local ping.
3 EU players + 1 SA player, the game put us in Berlin, London, Paris...
All players except one are playing with low local ping, one player is playing on +200ms
(The same goes for 2 SA players + 1 EU player, 2+2, 1+3... it will pick one of the two local regions)
So, my point is: If we definitely can't pick and choose a region to play in with citadel_region_override.
We could all benefit if at least we had a way to "prefer" a
better average ping oriented match while in a cross-region party, and just tell the game/matchmaking: "Hey, this party will play better with [80ms/100ms] than [200ms/40ms] ping time, so put them in Sterling, Virginia server as long as it takes to queue"
