After much anticipation, the Overwatch 2 launch was underwhelming, to say the least. There were DDoS attacks on launch day, and players had to battle server errors, long queues, broken account mergers, and strange SMS requirements that locked mobile players using prepaid phones out of the game.
Blizzard has apologized and announced what they’re doing to fix these issues. The Blizzard community manager, Jodie, apologized on the Blizzard forum. She stated that they expected the launch to go without any problems but that the team is working on fixing the issues that did arise.
Overwatch 2 introduced a new requirement for players to connect a phone number to their account. However, for some reason, this requirement doesn’t allow prepaid phone plans. The post explained that players who already have a Battle.net account won’t need a phone number from today as a fix for this issue. Unfortunately, it seems Blizzard isn’t removing this requirement entirely.
Jodie also announced that they are working on server stability to deal with the large number of crashes, lags, long queues, and even difficulty logging in. Some of the fixes will be to patch the login server and add nodes to the player database to lessen the load.
Another issue players experienced was merging accounts only to find lost inventory items. Blizzard is rolling out a UI fix to get more people to merge their accounts and stated that data isn’t lost. In many cases, it’s just taking longer to merge over to Overwatch 2.
Despite a rough launch, the game itself is solid – at least once you get past these initial issues. Even though there won’t be any loot boxes in Overwatch 2, it remains a fun team-based FPS that should only get better once these issues are resolved.
