I do not have a cell phone and never will due to anxiety requiring I have a way to escape my problems. Owning a cell phone by its nature means I would be carrying it with me all the time, so I wouldn’t have an escape by just leaving the house. Even if I could afford a cellphone on a post-paid plan i wouldn’t get one just to play a FREE game. So as an OW1 player of 5 years I am no longer able to even play THAT due to this forced SMS verification. There are multiple threads made by people who DO have cell phones that should be eligible but aren’t. In those same threads people with phones that shouldn’t be eligible successfully used them for SMS Protect. A LOT of people will be unable to play OW2, both existing OW1 players now locked out of their game, like me, and new players who were looking forward to this new free game that now demands you go buy a cell phone to play it on TOP of getting internet and a gaming PC or console to play it. This isn’t going to be outweighed by new players streaming in.
It’s 2022, your unique reason aside, most people have a cell phone and I don’t blame Blizzard for not catering to the minority of people who don’t have one when SMS protect is a proven way to minimize bad actors in F2P games… 
…I think it will but we’ll see in a few months…
I keep seeing this term but have no idea what it means? Would you be so kind as to explain for me? I’d appreciate it.
My guess is that they won’t take pre-paid because they’re trying to reduce smurfing using burner numbers.
Yeah… the number of people with ACCEPTED cell phones isn’t nearly as large as you think. Based on information on this forum the only accepted provider in Canada is Fizz, so even if I got permission from my retired mother to use her phone her provider is apparently not accepted. The forum is RIDDLED with people on post-paid phones unable to verify their numbers, being told to “Enter a post-paid phone number” despite doing exactly that. The requirement for a post-paid phone number from a small list of approved providers means the number of new players who meet this criteria won’t be nearly as large as everyone thinks. SMS isn’t even going to stop this. It’s tied to the number, not the phone account. It’s not hard to change your number to register a new account. It’s a small fee, less than the premium battle pass, and takes no more than about 5 minutes. They have numerous options that would allow more people to play but are opting for this narrow option that is already locking out a lot of existing players.
I already said “we’ll see in a few months” (as in I disagree with you and time will tell). Unsure why you’re stating more points lol…
Bad actors (in my opinion) from the way Blizz have used the term, refers to people who make Overwatch less enjoyable for the playerbase. This includes players who:
- are abusive
- smurf
- throw
- ‘game’ the system (alt accounts, SR manipulation, abuse glitches, etc)
- etc, etc
Basically, anyone trying to make the OW ‘game’ less fun for others… 
Thank you so much! I honestly had no idea what this term meant as all I thought about were literal bad actors 
I won’t see in a few months though as I am unable to play OW1 right now much less OW2 due to their SMS Protect requirement being implemented and the only cell phone in my household belong to my retired mother whose service provider does not appear to be on the list of providers Blizzard is accepting. The problem is ALREADY here and pushing out a lot of players who should be able to play but now aren’t, much less any potential new players.
…well time will tell I guess. We can reexamine this after a trimonthly evaluation process! 
Time will tell indeed as if this system is what they have at launch your trimonthly evaluation process will potentially result in “We lost a large chunk of our existing player base and aren’t getting enough new players to justify this.” There are multiple other verification options they could have gone with, or included more of them and required you use one in addition to e-mail. I fully expect you to just come back at me with another flippant dismissal of the problem because it doesn’t affect you personally so it’s not a problem in your eyes.
No we won’t.
Most people aren’t going to ask someone else to stop their busy lives for a game. Think we want to get hate for it? Strain our real life relationships?
Maybe 15-year-olds, but adults? Hey Bob, sorry you’re napping after being exhausted with your newborn, can you search your phone for a code Blizzard is asking for.
Hurry, I only have 20 seconds or 5 minutes or whatever.
48 million people in the US use Cricket, MetroPCS, Boost Mobile, and Mint.
37 million just for Cricket and Metro
That’s a HUGE purge.
ABK probably ran the numbers before making the decision.
It’s not just not having a phone number. It’s that many non-contract phone numbers, even monthly plans that require sign up, are not accepted.
We have Cricket so this is excluding my entire family from playing the game and we’ve treasured OW1 since launch. I have every skin in the game except OWL team colors and was very excited for OW2. I am a model player with a 5 star endorsement rating that has never gone down.
Now I will never be able to play OW with my daughters again, since I am a responsible adult, and not a teenager, drug addict, or college kids whose mommy and daddy doesn’t pay for their service so it gets shut off every couple of months, that can just change their phone number.
The most ironic part being that I’m sure I have more money to spend on Battle Passes and other FOMO mechanics than most people telling me to get over it.
That estimate is also my estimate, I have almost capped my friends list, among those 5 to 20% of them that I know and play regularly with won’t be able to play OW2 due to the sheer stupidity of SMS requirement being this extreme.
Some of them have Cricket, which Blizzard doesn’t allow. This is seriously selective picking the playerbase rather than compelling to bring “everyone to the game”. Keep this in, issues will rise, something will have to be done. Some people are placing wrong arguments against this, most notably about people not being able to afford it while having 40 inches TV in their living room.
I never had a mobile phone for my entire existence until i moved out for University. And I feel like I’m wasting cash to have an electronic extension on me half the time. I’ve always prioritised specific things for my own living first and extra at the end for my hobby (gaming). For some others it’s reading, but gaming is my hobby, therefore i invest a bit into it, but them requiring a mobile SMS auth is infuriating to the existing playerbase and I’m also part of that group.
I’m not a doomer, I’ve been a believer for the entire time, but this SMS auth requirement to access the entire game, that’s like a whole set of nails into a coffin for me, especially if I can’t queue with my pals who don’t have the auth activated.
So much for a company that incentives accessibility first. Every voice matters so long you got a specific phone attached to it. I’m still playing OW2 don’t get me wrong, but I’m losing interest over this grandiose degringolade of philosophies that are being butchered so bad.
Where are the days where you just click play, aren’t required to sign a soul contract bound to phone, accept the terms, do 10 squats, eat a whole bag of beans, show testimony to the law, present your wife and 10 kids just to be able to play a “sequel” from a game removed from your account that transferred itself into the “sequel” that you can’t play anymore.
All the haters and the lovers, Overwatch 2 really deserves both of them equally pre-launch because this is really NOT how you prepare your playerbase for a game.
We are waiting for the release of the game and theres no content, so some “people” are just looking for things to get offended by. The favourite sport of some folks "Self triggering" I call it.
Thank god theres less than a week left 
They should have thought of that ahead of time.
Completely different circumstance. I have not complained about any of the potentially bad decisions Blizzard has made about OW2. But this one is literally preventing me from even accessing the game.
I already knew I could not get a free Warzone account using my Cricket phone number, and that was fine, because it was free and that was the expectation to get in the door. Not only that, but if you wanted you could just buy a copy of COD and play Warzone without needing to add the SMS. Just based on that alone means the situations are not comparable.
Worse yet, this is not a “club” I was kept out of because I didn’t meet the requirements. This is something I’ve been involved in for 6 years. Thousands of hours and dollars. Every skin earned. 5 star endorsement rating. Now I am being shown the door simply because I have an affordable monthly plan with Cricket.
I am an adult. I cannot change my phone number after 10+ years of having the same one. Think of what that would entail! And NO, you CANNOT simply change providers and port your number, because any number previously used for Prepaid or VOIP can and likely will continue to remain flagged as ineligible. It even says so on the Blizzard support pages.
The even worse part is that while this may prevent the young kid smurfs and trolls from coming back after a ban, I promise you that anyone who wants to will find a way to circumvent the protection, yet a rule-abiding, money spending model player like myself will be kept out.
My boyfriend has a different problem. When he was creating his battlenet login (long time ago) and was putting in info like state etc. he put in his native country.
The thing is we live in a different country than our native one, and now with this new change he cannot enter his current phone number because it is not the area code of his origin country and he does not have a phone number from his native country since he has not been living there for the past 5 years.
He could not change the country in his profile because he has to contact customer support in order to do so and provide proof that he is no longer living in his native country which he did by sending them a photo of his ID.
The customer support replied to him stating that an ID is not enough and that they need a utility bill with his name and address. This would not be a problem per se if we lived in our own apartment but we are renting and all the bills are in the name of the owner.
We do not even see the bills because the rent we pay, the utilities are included in it and the owner pays all the bills. So he sent them a bill of something he has ordered online where his name and the address as well as his phone number is listed (of the country we live in now) so we are now waiting to see if it will be enough.
All of this to be able to access a video game. It is ridiculous.
I’m not sure at this rate if they will even address anything on this issue.