‘Overwatch 2’ no longer restricts players with prepaid phone numbers

Prepaid phone users may now play Overwatch 2. On Thursday, an Activision Blizzard community manager revealed the modifications, undoing an overzealous anti-cheating effort that had made it more difficult for novice players to try out the game. The change was made in the most recent patch for the first-person shooter and is effective immediately.

Blizzard had specified a set of moderating mechanisms, including the postpaid number requirement, ahead of the game’s free-to-play early access phase, which began on October 4th. Prepaid phones are significantly cheaper and simpler for cheaters and trolls to set up than postpaid lines, therefore excluding them from SMS verification may have been a well-intended step to prevent toxic behaviour. Unfortunately, it also prevented legitimate prepaid consumers from enjoying the game.

Blizzard’s other moderating mechanisms remain in place. To play Overwatch 2, each player must link a phone number to their Battle.net account, and that phone number cannot be linked to another account. You can’t still utilise VOIP, WiFi, text-only, or internet phone services to validate your account, so forget about resurrecting your old Google Voice number as a workaround. You don’t need to bother about SMS verification if you played the original Overwatch. Audio transcriptions for reported voice conversation recordings, as well as automatic review tools for combing over the generated text, are still in use as moderation tools.

Blizzard’s online first-person shooter has had a bumpy start. In addition to barring paying customers, Blizzard said that a DDoS assault forced players to wait in line with tens of thousands of other gamers. Bugs plagued the game throughout its early-access era, including missing objects and cash, portions that did not populate, and other inaccessible regions. Blizzard soon released freebies to compensate gamers for the difficult rollout.