Valorant Patch 4.01 Patch Notes Include Ares Nerfs

Valorant Patch 4.01 patch notes were revealed Wednesday morning, bringing Ares balance changes, melee adjustments, and a new muted words feature to the game.

Riot Games buffed the Ares in Patch 4.0, and the uptick in power has been relatively well received, but the developer has decided the weapon is now too easy to control. A slight price increase and some changes to its ease of control should bring the weapon's power back in line with the rest of the Valorant arsenal.

Riot also deemed melee attacks too difficult to aim, so it's made the hitboxes larger on both right click and left click.

Finally, players can now create a list of muted words that will be automatically censored in in-game chat. Those personal lists will then be used to improve Riot's automatic word filters, as players will be able to mute words that deliberately aim to circumvent the automatic system.

"Let's say 'Riot' is a bad word (scary, I know)," the developer explains. "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."

"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!"

See the full patch notes below, per Riot Games:

Valorant Patch 4.01 Patch Notes

Social Updates

• Muted Words List added to the settings

• 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!

Weapon Updates

Ares

The Patch 4.0 changes to the Ares made the weapon noticeably stronger, and we were happy to see it show up more in-game. However, it's overall tuning made it too easy to control and the lack of spin up removed some of what made the weapon unique. We love the benefits that the adjusted fire rate provided in terms of how the Ares felt to use, so we want to keep that. However, the adjustments below should make the weapon more difficult to control and bring back some of the weapon’s character by including a more prominent inverse accuracy.

• Price increased from 1550 >>> 1600
• Pitch recoil increased
• Spread changed from .8 >>> .7 after 10 bullets to 1.0 >>> .7 after 13 bullets
• Crouch benefits spread and recoil reduced from 40% >>> 25%

Melee

The melee’s been too tricky to aim with, making it tough to rely on. So we’ve updated both left and right click melee attacks for more reliable Agent-whacking action.

• 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 — Thanks to TowerofShadow for the report