With the hero shooter Overwatch 2 now available for players, developer Blizzard Entertainment has taken to the official site to provide the launch status update for the game. The lengthy message addressed the rocky launch as well as a few points of contention with the community such as the SMS protection system, long queues, server crashes and more.
First, the team apologizes to the players, explaining that they hold themselves to a higher standard compared to what the game launch was like. The developers also urged players to report their problems to the list of known issues here.
The team has made the decision to remove phone number requirements for a majority of existing Overwatch players. 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 on October 7.
“We remain committed to combating disruptive behavior in Overwatch 2—accounts that were not connected to Battle.net as well as new accounts will still have to meet SMS Protect requirements, which helps to ensure we’re protecting our community against cheating. If a player is caught engaging in disruptive behavior, their account may be banned whether they have a new account or not.”
There are two queues for players: one is through Battle.net and another is through the game itself. This process is usually invisible to players, but was being seen in real time which explains the jumping queue numbers. Developers made the change to simplify the queuing process, so players should now only be experiencing the one queue before entering the game.
There are several areas that are being worked on to improve stability, and beyond the queues the team is also working on another server update that will reduce the occurrences of players being disconnected once they’re already in game.
There have been changes to address the problems with account merge (missing players items/data). In all cases, no player data has been wiped or lost: sometimes items would take longer to appear or players wouldn’t receive the merge prompt. The bug with players who had merged their console and PC accounts and were experiencing problems logging in has been solved.
