Overwatch 2’s frustrating phone registration requirement axed for most players

rockpapershotgun.com:

Blizzard have said they’ve disabled the phone number account requirement for most Overwatch 2 players, following issues with registration for some. The company originally insisted on all players providing a phone number as part of the hero shooter’s new anti-cheat system, dubbed Defense Matrix. The planned change should go into effect from October 7th.

Starting with an apology and an acknowledgement that Overwatch 2’s launch hasn’t met player expectations, nor their own, Blizzard shared an update on issues they’re working on resolving that have cropped up since Tuesday’s launch. The areas they’re concentrating on are SMS registration, queuing, errors from account merging, and heroes being locked for players when they shouldn’t be. It’s quite a long list of problems, frankly.

Blizzard only revealed Overwatch 2’s phone registration requirement a week before the game’s launch. Since then, it’s emerged that some players on pre-paid phone plans in the US haven’t been able to register their number with Battle.net, as Blizzard doesn’t recognise the provider. The changes to phone registration for Overwatch 2 will mean that only players who don’t have an existing connected Battle.net account will need to register their number. Anyone who’s played Overwatch since June 9th, 2021 shouldn’t need to provide theirs.

The Overwatch 2 devs also say they’re dealing with the long queues and server crashes experienced by many people trying to play the game over the past few days. The queuing problems are partly down to the existence of two separate queues, one for Battle.net and another for the game itself. Blizzard say they’ve now simplified things so there’s just one queue. They’ve also patched a server that should make logging in