Please help me. The new design is weird and i cant find where to enable sms protection and i need to know how to enable it. I should be top 100 on eu but i dont have this enabled. Its insane that i cant find any guides on how to enable it. I have spent hundreds of hours to reach this rank, and then there is a fricking security thing that i have to enable and play 50 games more. Nobody has told me that i needed to do this. Why is there not a warning sign in game
Yeah they are changing a few things. I will try to properly update this guide sometime.
- Open your Blizzard Account Management page
- Select Account Details
- Go to the Phone section and select Add Phone Number
- You will receive a prompt to “Receive Security-Related Alerts”, be sure to enable that.
Once complete, you will need to play another 50 games with it enabled to qualify for Top 500.
It’d be nice to have alternate options to SMS. I’ve used a google voice number for years and it doesn’t permit using that for verification since it’s technically a VOIP number. My actual underlying number changes pretty frequently as I just hop onto whatever carrier has the best deal come up and link the new number to my GV phone number.
It’d be great if something like a yubikey could be used.
What Kind of «prompt» are you talking about?
There should be a checkbox offering to enable Security Alerts.
VoIP numbers cannot be used for two reasons. First, if say a user’s account was successfully hacked, the hacker could use a burner number to secure it and prevent it from being accessed by the original poster again. Secondly, leaderboard protocols like Overwatch PC top 500 is intended to keep individuals in that leaderboard. If SMS protect allowed VoIP numbers, then the whole purpose of using SMS Protect for the Top 500 would be defeated.
Can u get me a screenshot of it?
I am also not seeing where to enable security alerts. I enter my number, there’s the message “Your phone number has been successfully attached to your account.”, and that’s it.
That wasn’t at all the purpose of my post. I highlighted the fact that VOIP numbers are disallowed but are some peoples primary number… therefore an alternate verification method would be useful.
Yubikeys are used for highly secure 2-factor authentication and would in fact be far, far more secure than SMS which has been demonstrated as a weak 2-factor solution by security experts and is far more likely to result in an unathorized account take-over.
So by allowing an industry standard 2-factor security token as an alternative to SMS protect, Blizzard would demonstrate that they have a strong focus on security as well as providing VOIP users without a stable “real” phone number an alternate (and much better) way to secure their account.
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I apologize for the confusion, I worked through it myself and simply adding your phone number is all you need to do. I can say they are changing something about Account protection features, but I can’t say what the goals are yet and how they affect Overwatch. I will try to confirm that SMS Protect is still a rule for Top 500 PC, but I am 99% sure it is. In the mean time I got the new screenshots I needed to update this guide now.
It is a rule im a victim myself sadly
I trust you have completed the SMS protect setup now? Once you complete 50 more games (from the time of setup of SMS protect) and you are still within the rankings of Top 500, can you please confirm if you get the Top 500 status or not. That will help me out.
So let me just clarify. You go to your battle.net page and u click add phone number and u do so and now ur good? I actually added my phone number may 15th and im pretty sure i have played 50 games but i cant be sure
how can i find how many games i have played since may 15th
If you never used Overbuff before, it will update sessions between log ins, so if its your first time, you won’t be able to track data to determine the number of games played from before, but you now can moving forward. (Remember its a third-party site which merely collects data from Blizzard’s open API.)
I’ll play some more games until im 100% sure i have played 50 games and Get back to you if im still not t500
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I would like to share that i have gotten t500 and that this method works 
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finally… Congratulations!
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I second this post. I’ve been using Google Voice as my primary number since around 2010. Regardless of what Blizzard thinks about a VOIP number, I can’t see how at the very least it would be better than not allowing it at all. Or at least provide some more options to players to use, such as how you mentioned.