Overwatch 2 Status Update - October 7, 2022

Hello, heroes.

We’ve made progress working through many of the launch issues with Overwatch 2, and we are here to give some insight into what we have addressed, issues that have emerged now that we’ve cleared some of that away, and how we’re moving forward.

We expect to take the servers down at approximately 7pm PDT for an estimated one-hour maintenance to implement further fixes.

SMS Protect

The change to phone number requirements is now in effect. As we mentioned in our last status update, this means the majority of our console community (players who already had Overwatch connected to their Battle.net account, including any console player who has played since June 9, 2021) no longer need to meet SMS Protect requirements. Any PC player who ever played the original Overwatch has this requirement removed. If you have an active customer service ticket for SMS Protect but no longer need it due to this change, please close your tickets—this will help reduce our customer service queues and allow us to help other folks quicker.

Yesterday’s Fixes

Yesterday’s server shutdowns were to help address two issues: the first was used to deploy fixes for some bugs relating to account merges and logins. The second was to conduct some upgrades to our databases (we described these issues in our last status update). This has resulted in a quadrupling of our capacity and an eventual reduction in login queues overnight. We’re keeping an eye on this, particularly as we roll into the weekend when we expect more people will be logging in—early signs are good, the database looks healthy, but we will be constantly monitoring it. Weekend gamer hours will be its biggest test yet.

Account Merge

We’ve made progress here, and we believe we have a working resolution for the general merging issues. Some players who merged their accounts should now be seeing their full collections, but we have many still in queue to be resolved, and we expect more to be added to the queue as people log in for the first time over the weekend. As we said previously, your collection is not lost, and with the database now updated, we now have more bandwidth to complete these merges.

Watchpoint Pack on Consoles

Console players who pre-purchased the Watchpoint Pack may not be seeing the items as being available—while some users are experiencing this on Xbox, this issue mostly appears on PlayStation right now. We have a fix for this that we plan to deploy in our downtime later today.

LC-208

We resolved a majority of these issues with our fixes yesterday, but the issue persists for a small group of players who are still seeing this error, which is preventing login. We have a fix for this that we are also planning to deploy in today’s downtime.

Matchmaking

Now that we’ve increased capacity and have a higher player concurrency, matchmaking systems are being affected, which means you may be seeing a wait before being placed in a match. We are changing configurations within this system today and hope to somewhat shorten that wait throughout the day. We will continue looking into the matchmaking queues through the weekend to identify any additional improvements we can make.

Miscellaneous Client Crashes/Black Screen Issues

We have gathered reports around crashes happening in a few different scenarios here and there. We will continue to work on fixes for these issues, and hope to deploy them in updates coming as soon as today.

Thank You

We understand that the launch experience has been frustrating for many people in our community. We deeply appreciate your patience and thank you for your support, and we are laser focused on improving the Overwatch 2 experience for all players.

We’ll be back early next week to provide more updates on the forums, but if anything needs to be communicated in the meantime, we will post to @PlayOverwatch to keep you informed.

Thank you, heroes.

The Overwatch Team

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