‘Valorant’ to make the game “less toxic” with player-curated muted word list

Riot Games have announced that the 4.01 patch for Valorant will go live later today (January 19) allowing players to curate their own muted word list.

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As it stands, Valorant has an AI that filters out unsavoury language from the game but this new addition will allow players to curate which words they don’t want to see 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,” reads the announcement before explaining how the use of numbers and punctuation in the place of letters is allowing players to bypass the current setup.

“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!”

The 4.01 patch will also introduce changes to the Ares machine gun and melee controls. “The melee’s been too tricky to aim with, making it tough to rely on,” said Valorant developers. “So we’ve updated both left and right click melee attacks for more reliable Agent-whacking action.”

Check out the full patch notes below:

Ares weapon updates:
– 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 updates:

– 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)

Bug fixes:

– Fixed a bug where the Origin collection idle animations weren’t playing for some levels and variants in Spectator mode
– Fixed an issue where observer player hotkeys would change after side-swap.
– Fixed an issue where performance charts that require NVIDIA Reflex were displayed and could not be hidden

The 4.01 update for Valorant follows on from the chunky 4.0 update which launched January 11 and introduced new agent, Neon.