Valorant Patch 4.01 Highlights

Patch 4.01 for Valorant launches with much anticipated nerfs and adjustments to the Ares alongside social updates to assist the automated bad word detection system in Riot's fight to combat toxicity in-game.

Rolling back on the Ares meta

While the previous patch did a lot of good for the Ares in the meta, some might argue that it did a bit too much good. To counteract the overtuning, this update balances a few areas that made the machine gun excessively effective.

This includes a slight price increase, bumping the cost from 1550 up to 1600 creds, increasing recoil, and reducing the crouch benefit on spread and recoil.

With these adjustments, Riot are aiming to dial back slightly on the previous improvements, while still maintaining the essence of what made it viable in competitive play.

New ways of dealing with toxicity

Riot have also increased their prevention of foul language and toxicity to deal with players circumventing certain banned words using symbols in place of letters. To assist their automated bad word system, players will get to use a new ‘Muted Word List’ to add words that they don’t want to see in-game chat.

The list works by letting players type in variations of words and phrases that they want to censor. The idea is to essentially feed the database with words, to help make it easier for the detection to snuff out the outliers.

You can check out the full patch notes from Riot Games here.