To play Overwatch 2, players must link their phone number to their Battle.net account. This is a new requirement not detailed in recent Blizzards. blog post announced the change. Blizzard is now detailing why the new SMS Protect requirement is necessary.
When Overwatch 2 releases on October 4th, all players, including those who purchased the original Overwatch and those playing on console, will be able to call their Battle.net account to play. You have to link the numbers. The same phone number cannot be used for multiple accounts and Blizzard does not accept prepaid numbers and his VOIP number.
in a new interview with forbes, Blizzard explains that this change is to prevent bad actors from using cheats to cycle multiple additional accounts that all share the same phone number. If you got banned and had to create a new account, Overwatch’s box price acted as the cost. Now that the game is free to play, the barrier to entry is much lower, so Blizzard needed another solution.
Overwatch 2 Lead Software Engineer Bill Warnecke said: “But if that player gets banned for that account and can quickly rejoin with a new account, all the detections in the world will not stop us from keeping bad guys out of the game. Over. Losing an account in Watch 2 is a much more severe penalty than in Overwatch 1.”
Warnecke said there are cases where non-malicious “good” players with multiple accounts are adversely affected by the phone number requirement. This was something Blizzard “took very seriously”. It was decided to become
Blizzard recently detailed its “Defense Matrix Initiative” including SMS Protect, but also outlined how new Overwatch 2 player onboarding will work. Called the First Time User Experience, its onboarding process sees new players gradually unlock modes and heroes over the course of playing 100 games. Blizzard says that first-time user experience can also help identify bad actors. It takes time for new accounts created by cheaters to unlock additional heroes and the game’s competitive playlists, so Blizzard identified them before they became too disruptive. Because it can give you more time to ban. .
Overwatch 2 sees many big changes from the original multiplayer shooter. In addition to being free to play, Overwatch 2 ditches loot boxes for a Battle Pass system. Existing players will also need to purchase the game’s premium battle pass or skim the game’s free battle pass to unlock new heroes (except for Junker His Queen, Sojourn, and Kiriko). This change confused much of the Overwatch community.
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