No Phone Numbers for People Who Own OW1

All modes ideally. I don’t want smurfs, hackers etc. to get a free pass to enter my Mystery Heroes games :confounded:

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I think this is a good idea. legit players like myself still want to play even though blizzard doesnt like our specific phone number (or lack of one!)

accounts in good standing should be able to bypass the SMS protect. we need some kind of alternative

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This is an interesting idea. Currently there’s very little protection from cheaters in QP and Arcade, where many people play. Most of their new tools really only deter cheaters from rated. From what people are saying, cheaters will be able to get numbers fairly cheaply to start new accounts, and all of those people are going to end up in our QP and Arcade games.

Having two queues might help keep cheaters in one since they’d prefer that over having to pay money for a new number (maybe?).

I think people who owned OW1 and have a certain amount of played time should automatically end up in the verified pool also.

I don’t think Blizzard would do this though as it may mean they have to provide server resources for a much larger number of players, many of whom may be hackers if they could just make an account and play unverified at any time.

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Dats discrimination bro… :angry:

This is a good idea, but maybe instead of playtime, they look to see how many times one has been banned for a good reason to see if they do or do not qualify?

Ohhh, playtime, I see now! More hours mean you had the same account for a while. I’m so dumb lol

When CS:Go went F2P, they allowed a person to use either their mobile number or a paid account upgrade to get them into the ‘verified’ queues.

I’d be happier to pay for access than give them my mobile number, but they’ve already had it for years so :man_shrugging:

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Gatekeeping with a Mobile Phone is a terrible idea, and it only hurts honest players.


Do they really think that dishonest players are going to be stopped flat in their tracks with PAID devices on the approved list?!

Because if they do, they literally have astounded me and the human race itself. We all KNOW that those players, when they get banned are going to call up Their phone carrier and BEG for a new number, just so they can sign up for ANOTHER overwatch account and do it ALL over again. and now that the game is FREE. It will be happening at an exponentially FASTER rate.

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May you elaborate a bit on what this means? Sorry, I don’t understand it aha :sweat_smile:

You pay a small fee ($15-ish, I think?) and bam, your account is now “verified”.

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That would be perfect. They make more money… People get to play the game. Win-win. Obviously they should have never been locked to begin with, but you know, this is Blizzard. We should just count our blessings that it is not as bad as it could be. :pray:

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That’d probably work too. In any case, having two separate queues is definitely the way to go imo.

An smurf plays way more than 50 wins to actually unlock comp. Is roughly 138 games on group.

They lowered the requirement to actually play comp, the only countermeasure for smurfing is actually SMS tho. Some folks are being penalized but unless everybody agrees on like 200 games/wins smurfing would be a thing anyways.

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Being able to buy your way into the game with a one-time fee would be no different than OW1, which had a smurfing problem. However it would be vastly preferable to blocking access to prepaid phones.

In CS:GO most of the ‘cheaters’ ended up using the unverified queues, apparently.

Hmm…but can smurfs just do this too to verify theirs? Maybe there should be a block where you can only add 1 account and that is it?

You mean all the smurfs?

It does not make any sense the way it is as well.
I can get an infinite number of phone numbers for 2€ each. And with eSIM it is actually faster and easier to get a new number then to get a new E-Mail you also need.

Why should anybody be bothered by 2€ if they payed 40€ for each Overwatch copy?

And most of the egregious ones would get banned. There is only a limited number of ow1 licensed accounts now (besides maybe the watchpoint pack if that counts which it shouldn’t after ow2 launches and that’s $40 anyway. I don’t think any smurf / alt is gonna wanna be paying that much. People coming back and new players joining the game should be enough to offset most of the issues and over time it’ll only improve as genuine players get to play the game whilst trolls/cheaters/smurfs get reported and banned

This right here is how you fix the problem.

If you’re an old subscriber like me, who’s been part of WoW since beta, and the account shows that… I think you should get a pass.

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Great news for those who have OW1 already!