Modern Warfare 2 to Have Controversial Phone Registration Feature

If you’ve been paying attention to the launch of Overwatch 2, you’ll know that it hasn’t gone as Activision-Blizzard had hoped. While it may not have been a complete disaster, it was darn close. It had multiple issues that happened right at launch, not the least of which was a DDoS Attack that brought playing the game to a crawl because its servers couldn’t handle the overload of players on its servers. But, another critical issue that set things back was a new feature that required players to register a phone number to play the game. Now, that controversial addition will come to Modern Warfare 2 next month, which is already not pleasing a lot of players.

This revelation comes from the website for the game, which calls out the recent game’s launch and reaffirms that Modern Warfare 2 will have the same feature.

“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, newly created Overwatch 2 accounts, and newly created Call of Duty: Modern Warfare accounts require a phone number.”

Not unlike what happened with Blizzard’s title, this will cause problems for certain gamers. That includes people who do not have a cell phone/ or home phone to register for one reason or another. Furthermore, one of the controversies of this move was that you had to have a dedicated phone plan to adhere to the rules of the policy. If you have a prepaid phone, you won’t be able to play through Battle.net. That also includes voice apps and messaging apps.

So if you don’t have a phone with a dedicated plan, you won’t be able to play the game. When this caused issues for Overwatch 2 players, Blizzard conceded that if you had a Batte.net account for over a year, you could work around this rule. But those who were new and had just made their accounts still had to adhere to it.

To those curious about why Activision-Blizzard is so concerned with phone numbers, they state that this is their attempt to eliminate “disruptive behavior” by ensuring everyone on the servers is there legitimately. Hate speech and acts in games like Call of Duty and Overwatch are well-documented. In fact, these titles are widely considered to be the games that have the most aggressive players who often go out of their way to harass others. That has led many players to quit the games cold turkey because they don’t want to deal with the harassment every time they go online.

On the one hand, you can appreciate Activision-Blizzard’s trying to curb this kind of behavior. But, on the other hand, this kind of feature is hurting players who have done nothing to others and might have legitimate reasons for not having a phone. We’ll have to see how this plays out with the upcoming launch.

Source: Battle.net