After what’s been a rocky couple of days since the launch of Overwatch 2, Blizzard has now issued an apology to players. With connection and access issues amongst the top problems players have had so far, Blizzard has now recognised the community’s dissatisfaction and promised to do better going forward.
The new iteration of its popular hero shooter only went live on Tuesday, but already many players have reported difficulties actually accessing the game. Thrown into the mix was a fairly unpopular and confusing requirement to have SMS Protect enabled on a linked mobile phone, which left some players who use prepaid phone plans out in the cold. The launch started off with two DDoS attacks and continued with a number of difficulties with server stability and account merge problems. It’s fair to say that things could have definitely got off to a much smoother start, but the team at Blizzard are now trying to do a bit of damage control.
In a new announcement on the Overwatch 2 website, Blizzard community manager Jodie has shared the developers’ disappointment and frustration with the game’s launch. “While millions of people have been enjoying the game,” Jodie explains, “the launch has not met your, or our, expectations.” This was followed up with an acknowledgement of the problems players have been experiencing, as well as importantly, an apology. “First, we want to apologize to our players. We expected the launch of Overwatch 2 to go smoothly. We hold ourselves to a higher standard and we are working hard to resolve the issues you are experiencing.”
The update also lists some of the main issues, the most notable of these being the perplexing SMS Protect requirement. Thankfully, Blizzard has now confirmed that it will be removing the mandatory phone number requirement for most players of Overwatch 2 as of this coming Friday. However, the update also explains that the requirement will remain in place for certain types of accounts. “We remain committed to combating disruptive behavior in Overwatch 2,” it explains, adding that “accounts that were not connected to Battle.net, as well as new accounts, will still have to meet SMS Protect requirements.” It’s clearly a part of Blizzard’s strategy for fighting against cheats and trolls, but for the majority of longstanding players, this news should come as a relief.
In addition to addressing the phone number debacle, the update also touches on queue issues, server crashes and overall game stability. The short answer to this one is that Blizzard is working on it. They’ve fixed some of the difficulties with server and game stability thanks to the addition of more nodes to the player database, but in terms of queues, players will probably still be experiencing them for a little while yet.
For the full breakdown of how Blizzard is currently addressing the Overwatch 2 problems, you can check out the official update for details.
Overwatch 2 is available now on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC.