Not necessarily, I can stomp low ranks without throwing (some weird mmr bubble mixed with some bad luck and the fact that I was only ever diamond to begin with). And yes, ANYONE would take less of them. I get that. But not at the cost of genuine players. That is just not something I would ever endorse.
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The phones that blizzard wants a person to have are 200 dollars with a phone plan that is 110 or more a month.
For many of us, we dont have that kind of money sitting around. A typical US budget ranges in the “Friendly” zone of ;
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insurance for a vehicle 170 a month (if you have an auto loan).
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Student loan payment 150-275 a month
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Electricity payment 225-375 a month
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Telcom internet 110-185 a month
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fuel and transportation costs 35-65 a day
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mortgage or rental 850-1950 per month
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Home owners insurance 150-225 per month
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City water and sewer: 125-260 per month
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waste disposal 35-65 per month
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property taxes per month can be anywhere from 65-335 per month, depending upon the city or county’s tax codes.
- vehicle payment 385-650 per month.
- 337-428 in groceries, per WEEK.
As the consumer price index rises, the GDP and export we have isn’t enough to sustain the U.S. dollar and make “green” profit in order for the public to have extra disposable income right now.
Right now, spending savvy people are gravitating towards that prepaid plan, so they CAN afford to upgrade their computers, otherwise a person tacks on another 200 per month on the phone payment, plus the 100 dollars or more per month extra on the service plan.
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This is weird. I literaly have “pay what you spend” every month with my phone and it´s cheaper, than any pre - paid option I had before…and my number passed.
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…how are they losing access exactly? 
You literally can’t play the game with out a “post-paid” phone number and OW1 is shutting down for good. So that’s the access they are losing. Might want to look around the forums more to see it’s a very common problem that Blizzard is neglecting.
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Dude you are in every thread ranting like an old boomer about your cost of living and how Blizzard is being so unfair that it’s beyond old at this point, maybe you just need to accept that gaming as a hobby isn’t for you if there’s so many obstacles between you and it regarding your whole ‘rural’ lifestyle.
I’m also poor, I also live in the middle of the 
-end of nowhere (in Florida, not the mountains, but still), and I have had no problems with the game.
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“This issue doesn’t affect me, therefore there is no problem so shut up.”
That’s essentially what that comment sounds like. If his complaints are getting old to you, don’t read them and stay out of topics about said issue. You don’t walk into a fish market and complain about them constantly trying to sell you fish.
It’s weird that you are even trying to defend gaming becoming more exclusive instead of being inclusive. “Maybe gaming as a hobby isn’t for you if there’s so many obstacles” that a yikes mate.
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What an awful take. lol.
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That’s not at all what I’m saying, I’m saying he, specifically, needs to quit his whining since every time I turn around he’s got a new excuse and new problem that Blizzard needs to capitulate to rather than accept that maybe this isn’t an environment SPECIFICALLY for him.
First it’s connection problems are somehow Blizz’s fault because apparently his region isn’t in a good network/internet area due to being rural (the whole nonsense about copper wiring). Now it’s the phone service issue, compounded by having pre-paid instead of post-paid (when people have pointed out there ARE pre-paid services being accepted you can SWITCH TO and not have to use a post-paid), now it’s “the economy is bad and Blizz expecting me to pay money is a crime against me, specifically”, like I don’t like their monetization method much either but Blizz isn’t going to change so either I would learn to budget or just quit the game if it’s not worth my time and money.
It’s like, let’s say you don’t like horror movies. Are you going to spend money and go to a horror movie and complain that it was a horror movie, or are you going to go see something you actually DO like?
talk about a selfish person. Jeeeeze no wonder why this community has gone out the door.
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I would prefer that there is a barrier to entry so that bans don’t mean completely nothing, yes.
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I’m not selfish just because I think you’re being insanely unrealistic, and, ironically, the entitled one here.
It’s not unrealistic to ask for Blizzard to come up with consumer-friendly monetization methods. It’s not unrealistic to ask for them to roll out their SMS verification better. These are complaints that can (and should) be handled better. Whether they are or not is up to Blizzard, we just have to wait and see like everything else they do.
It’s very unrealistic to demand that they cater to your every single demand as a minority player, with regards to your bad connection, your bad phone, your…inability to budget a hobby, apparently?
And yes, gaming is a hobby, that requires investment of time, or money, or both. Whether that be in hardware, subscription, the actual cost of the game. I can’t afford to play Elden Ring because my laptop isn’t powerful enough for it, am I out here demanding Fromsoft create a downgraded version just for me? No.
People have pointed out ways to afford a cheap alternative to the prepaid/postpaid phone issue if you want to play THAT BADLY instead of waiting for Blizz to possibly resolve/offer an alternative to the current issue with the SMS verification. You instead are ranting about the economy and inflation for some reason like that’s Blizzard’s fault that the cost of everything is going up.
I’m not here to be all “oh woe is the poor wittle megacorporation quit being a doomer”, I for one am very displeased about the direction everything has gone and wish it was better. But if we lived in an ideal world, we’d all have fiber internet for free and I wouldn’t have to spoof my location to Chicago to decent ping because Blizz is too cheap to pay for server banks outside of there and Los Angeles, I’d have singleplayer PvE so I never have to see any of you again, and I could torrent it instead of paying for it.
But we don’t live in an ideal world and as such there’s a point you have to accept that things just are not for you when the demands you make go past the point of reasonable.
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I do not agree. I would rather have someone that should have been banned still supporting the game than lose someone who wanted to play, but could not. The more the merrier. It is just a game. These are not violent inmates posing a public safety risk.
And honestly, even if they were, my opinion largely remains the same.
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You do realize that this SMS is not a safety fix like you think.
In the position now. Where it stands with this. This ONLY hurts the Honest player and for anyone that has the intent to break the rules… well it aint gonna stop em.
Wednesday morning if I was a smurff (Which I am NOT and dont like them either). I could take my phone number and sign up for Overwatch on a new account.
It will ask me for an SMS. I will give them that number and create an account, the game is FREE to Play. There, after I get everything squared away. I can boot up my copy of Citrix or VMware virtual desktop. assign the proper protocols to it, in order to play Overwatch by giving it the necessary resources to run. I can set ALL sorts of goodies up in order to give UNIQUE hardware IDs, network routes, and about anything in the toolkit that a Certain Kali has with it.
After that, I could (will not) perhaps THROW matches, CHEAT, abuse others in chat, use a nasty voice comms voice changer and say all sorts of awful things. I could throw, derank and cliff dive in Competitive,…
From there, the account will probably be banned after about a week’s worth of reports.
Next, I COULD call up my phone carrier and tell them that someone is doing very bad things by calling my phone at 2am and bothering me, so I probably need a new number.
From there, I COULD go right back to my SAME machine, with a NEW Virtual machine and new virtual machine ID . I COULD Re-create a new overwatch account, use the new SMS number I COULD have created through that provider, and COULD do it ALL OVER again. With new email addresses, new contact information, and about everything replaced again.
I could care less about exposing this , because players need to know. This is NOT a thing that WILL be stopped, and this is already plastered up on the internet now, for weeks. So everyone knows about this already and just how bogus of an idea it is.
The solution: IS to keep the game at a cost of 50 dollars for a NEW account and 20 dollars for an existing account upgrade.
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We’re not even talking about SMS verification’s actual capability of stopping smurfs or not. This is a whole new issue that you’re bringing up.
We’re talking about players being unable to access it from the get-go, because of their phone service, and whether or not it is realistic to demand Blizzard fix the issue or not, or if this is more of a hiccup in the system (this really SHOULD have been rolled out months ago, my guess is they’re using the “early access” as a blanket-all backside cover). As it stands, yes, it is realistic to ask Blizzard to maybe think before they fully engage with this method because it seems like there’s a lot of bugs that still need ironing out with it. No, it is not realistic to demand they do away with the service entirely as a F2P title needs some kind of verifications to stop or slow down trolls/cheaters/smurfs/etc.
Also for the record, your example is still a minority issue. Yes, you could in fact go through the effort to do all of that just to make a trolling account. But the vast majority of griefing players are not going to put up with that just to keep griefing.
Yeah, it IS a big deal that players CANT play the game without being on a specific network and I HATE that Blizzard wants to do that to the community. People have a RIGHT to be playing this game. Including the ones that threw MONEY at the service to play in the first place.
The people that complain about wanting SMS the most, would throw out every drop of water, and eliminate the entire Q pool just so they could have MAYBE a better match? I mean thats like saying, take cars off the street because traffic accidents cause the most fatalities in the U.S.
You can’t speculate intentions of a person, therefore you dont know how many people are going to circumvent the system.
I mean do you have a magic crystal ball that reads minds? Guess the number behind my back. … it was 3… So you wouldn’t have known that, unless I told you.
I always hear this “crystal ball prediction” that people use, and yet somehow if they could predict the future or human behavior. We wouldn’t have casinos or gambling, because it would be a pointless business to be in. but guesssssss what. We cant predict how people are going to behave.
Anyway, what do YOU want? Do you want a SMALL micro community where you have a Country Club version of this game and VERY long Q times because there aren’t many players here to play With and Against you in a Match, or do you want MASSIVE pools of players so you are NOT waiting 10 or 20 MINUTES to play a match?
And dont say that it is a small number of people that use prepaid phones. Because Tracfone, alone reports 21 MILLION subscribers and 8.1 BILLION dollars in revenue.
(U.S. population is 315 million btw).
This is a video game, it is a hobby, not a right in the slightest. Even so, I’m pretty sure there is absolutely nothing in whatever terms of service we signed up for that says we are entitled to keep playing even if we did pay. Otherwise bans wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Cars compound several other issues and most studies show well-funded public transportation and walkable communities are a vast improvement for everyone, but go off with your bad comparison I guess. Also many players have said they would RETURN if the queue pool was improved through some method of community management for smurfing and the like, on top of new content.
We absolutely can predict how people are going to behave, are you nuts? Psychology is all about predicting behaviors, and a lot of treatment for mental illness (such as gambling addiction, in fact!) is to predict and stop unwanted ones at their source.
Here’s an example: Not every drunk driver is going to kill someone, after all, but does this mean we should just let them keep driving drunk in case they’re “one of the safe ones”, if we’re going to keep using your terrible car analogy?
I want good, fun matches with players who are actually supposed to be there, not trolling, not disruptive, not throwing or cheating or circumventing a toxicity ban on their 20th alt, and I’m willing to make certain sacrifices (giving Blizz my number for verification, playing on a single account, waiting longer) in order to have those matches.
Tracfone is one of the providers that many people on this very forum are citing as working for the SMS verification.
Also, 21 million out of 315 million is only 15%. That’s still a minority any way you slice it.
I am willing to discuss this with you. But not when you jump to emotional statements. When you add negative connotations to make an attempt to justify your point, it comes off as personal bias and not presentable evidence to sway me to the side of your discussion. In a civil discourse, people don’t use that type of language. I am just going to leave it at that.
I dont agree with you and you don’t agree with me.
But you will anyway.
Then when people still complain maybe they take things a step further…
Then you find out you’re the one with the game being made effectively dead for you.
At some point a company can create a line you can’t or won’t cross.
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This honestly might not be a bad idea
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