Activision Blizzard had big ambitions for the launch of Overwatch 2, specifically regarding player security and overall online infrastructure. However, the existing player base did not willingly accept SMS protect, one of the steps taken towards that vision.
Due to community feedback following the recent launch of Overwatch 2, Activision has announced today that existing players from the original Overwatch won’t need to assign a mobile phone number in order to play. “We have made the decision to remove phone number requirements for a majority of existing Overwatch players”, reads the official statement.
Activision went on to explain that “any Overwatch player with a connected Battle.net account, which includes all players who have played since June 9, 2021, will not have to provide a phone number to play”. This change is expected to go live starting from Friday, October 7th.
The requirement for Overwatch 2 players to have a connected phone number, known officially as SMS Protect, is a double verification step implemented to ensure that the player base will only include genuine competitors, and keep disruptive and fake accounts on a harsher leash. This was supposed to work in unison with another feature called First Time User Experience (FUTE), to ensure that cheating players and fake accounts will be met with as many obstacles as possible and give the team some time to deal with them appropriately.
As reported by Forbes, the backlash from players was immense, since prepaid phones are not accepted, and not many children are old enough to have phones, despite being dedicated players for years. It should be noted that only old players will not have to log in using their phones. New players will not be exempt from this. If you are a new Overwatch 2 user, you still have to use your personal phone number from a non-prepaid phone.
This was just a drop in the sea of a long list of issues such as login queues, server crashes and stability problems, all of which were exacerbated by a DDoS attack on the day of the big launch.
In Blizzard’s recent report, they have published a list of the common issues they are most aware of and are currently being worked on. The developers have also released quick fixes for the account merger problem between Overwatch 1 and 2, which was until now a cause for having players miss out on crucial items and data.
There are different fixes for users who are playing on PC and consoles, some of which already have discovered solutions to the known issues, whether they are log-in problems, missing data/heroes or other things. So for now, Blizzard advises players to follow these steps and wait for further updates regarding the game’s overall situation post-launch.