Riot Games will introduce Patch 4.01 to VALORANT today. It’s not a major update, but the devs have done a second round of changes to Ares, a weapon that was buffed in Patch 4.0.
The buff to the machine gun made the weapon “noticeably stronger,” according to the devs, and saw the Ares become a more popular choice in games. The changes in Patch 4.01 will increase the price of the Ares from 1,550 to 1,600 and increase its pitch recoil. The way the bullets spread has also been changed. Moving forward, it will be far more beneficial to use the Ares while crouched.
Aside from the Ares, the VALORANT devs also made changes to the game’s melee. The right-click hitboxes are now 1.5-times larger and the left-click hitboxes are now larger than a right-click. From now on, the targets closer to the center of your tactical knife will get hit first.
Moving on from some of the gameplay aspects, Riot has added a new section called the Muted Word List, where players can type words or sentences that they personally don’t want to see in-game. This was implemented because some players found a way around Riot’s automated bad word detection system to be toxic to others.
Here are the full notes for VALORANT Patch 4.01.
Weapon updates
Ares
- Price increased from 1,550 >>> 1,600.
- Pitch recoil increased.
- Spread changed from 0.8 >>> 0.7 after 10 bullets to 1.0 >>> 0.7 after 13 bullets.
- Crouch benefits spread and recoil reduced from 40 percent >>> 25 percent.
Melee (but for real this time)
- Right click hitboxes are now 1.5x larger. Left click hitboxes are now larger than a right click and have a slightly longer range too.
- Targets closer to the center of your knife attacks will get hit first, so you still have precision if you need it.
- Bonus: Knifing walls now have instant feedback when slicing up walls (predicted on the client side).
Bugs
Weapons
- Fixed a bug where the Origin collection idle Animations weren’t playing for some levels and variants in Spectator mode.
Esports features
- Fixed an issue where observer player hotkeys would change after side-swap.
Performance
- Fixed an issue where performance charts that require NVIDIA Reflex were displayed and could not be hidden.
Social updates
- “Muted Word List is a new section you will find in your settings where you can type in variations of words/phrases that you, personally, would not like to see appear in-game.”
- “We admit that some players are often smarter than our automated bad word detection system and continually find creative ways to type things we don’t want to in chat. This is why we need your help to make our detections better! Help us, help you.”
- “For example: Let’s say ‘Riot’ is a bad word (scary, I know). Our detection may catch the word ‘Riot’ as one that should be blocked and penalized, but there’s a variety of different ways to spell Riot that we may not be catching: R!ot, R!0t, Ri0t, etc.”
- “And no, you won’t get League of Legends banned from chat.
- “We’re hoping that we can leverage the lists that you and others create to make the chat less toxic by comparing them across regions, and using the data we collect to improve our own detections of bad words. Thanks in advance for all that are willing to lend a hand. Let’s make VALORANT a better place for everyone.”
