Now, Blizzard has actually made further modifications by allowing people to develop brand-new Battle.net accounts and play Overwatch 2 even if they have a prepaid phone.
People didn’t like that one bit, so Blizzard used a compromise by saying that if you’d had a Battle.net account given that June 9, 2021, you didn’t need to have a contact number tied to your account. It wasn’t a perfect service, however it did make it so that individuals who had prepaid phones and were playing Overwatch before could continue playing the follow-up.
Beginning today, we are broadening international SMS Protect access to pre-paid phones, Blizzard stated. We are thrilled to welcome more gamers to Overwatch 2 while continuing our commitment to combating disruptive habits and safeguarding the stability of the gamer experience. This upgrade may take several hours to present totally, and we can’t wait to see you in-game!
The controversy, for those not familiar with the situation, included an SMS Protect system that made it so that gamers would have a harder time returning to the game if they’d been prohibited considering that a contact number was required to set up an account. Not a bad idea in practice and not too dissimilar from some approaches of executing two-factor authentication, but the main issue with this system was that it didn’t enable those phone numbers to be connected to prepaid phones. This basically meant that anybody who utilized prepaid phones couldn’t play Overwatch 2.
Overwatch 2 has actually not lacked its issues at launch, however one of the game’s most significant controversies didn’t even have anything to do with skins, roles, or anything like that. It included phones, and more specifically, the requirement to register a phone number with Blizzard to continue playing Overwatch 2. It was a point of contention when the security requirement was first revealed, and just over a month after the video game’s launch, Blizzard has as soon as again softened its stance on the phone requirements.
Blizzard has been broad in its framing of SMS Protect’s purposes by stating it adds an additional layer of security and is an industry-proven service in cheating both combating and disruptive behavior. Aside from cheaters and other troublesome people, it reasons that this function could also cut down on smurf accounts, too.