Some others whom also use Pre-Paid came out on OF claiming they were Verified.
At the very least Blizzard must come out & fully explain why some ppl can play while others cannot.
Then hopefully those ppl can remedy the situation themselves w/o wasting anyone else’s time.
Lol no, That would mean more smurfs and everything else. SMS is the best thing to happen to overwatch if it means better games and better players. That way if someone gets banned there’s no coming back
i do kind of wonder. if you think about its probably gonna lock out a huge player base which equals $$$$. in a way i do like how it somewhat deters hacking and smurfing but is it the best solution? i mean i am sure hackers and smurfs will find ways around it so were back to square one… it is a never ending arms race but the casualties are legitimate players
What’s stopping “Cheaters” from changing their Cellular #
It’s not preventing nor stopping Cheating whatsoever. Idk where ppl get such ideas. As if Cellular #s are locked into stone.
The only thing capable of stopping anything you listed is Blizzard themselves via an in-game Cheat Detection System. That and players Reporting others.
Phone # won’t stop anything but deter NEW players from possibly joining the game which will inadvertently increase our Que times.
If they give a phone number to a hacked account they’re dumb.
That’s dangerous af
What…. You provide a # then you get caught Cheating so now you are BANNED. So you now change your # for your Cellular.
Not sure which way you are looking at such tbh. I never saw anything mentioned about Hacked Accounts.
I got my Account hacked & returned. I don’t think such is even relevant to the Topic?
That would be nice, but people have pointed out the issues with this system since at least July when it was first suspected and they had months to talk about it.
It’s possible they didn’t realize how many would be affected by it, but they could have officially announced it in July when people were already talking about it to measure the feedback at that time if they actually cared about the players they were going to lose. That would have given them time to come up with alternatives. Now they have only days before launch.
I think they already calculated it and just view them as numbers. The individual experiences of the players harmed by this mean absolutely nothing to them. They knew some people even with numbers had plans that would not work and they did not care about the hoops they’d have to jump through to get a new number. They didn’t care that changing your number is a huge pain for people. They didn’t care if you’d even bother to stay or not since they probably already estimated the new players would outweigh the losses anyway.
It was always a cold-hearted choice, which is why they avoided the topic for months no matter how often they were asked about it.
OW2 isn’t being made for the OW1 audience… 
Anyone still here playing OW1 at this stage will play OW2 and Blizz know it (and could care less if a few drop off)…
It’s a pretty good estimate considering around 1/3 of the US players supposedly are on prepaid.
Which they already have.
You would be surprised how much of a deterrent the SMS is for new players.
I can tell you that if many F2P games like Valorant, Apex, Halo or Bloodhunt required SMS to play, I would not be playing them just because.
And thats being a veteran of FPS, if we are talking about kids/teens, even worse.
Everyone use it on fortnite that’s the only way to play in arena and gift skins etc .
what about warzone ? that game did the same thing as OW2 and nobody complained
Since this is high in the thread I feel the need to point out most of the problem isn’t lack of SMS, its that they’re discriminating against pre-paid carriers. I use SMS for 2fa for a dozen other services but Blizzard won’t take it for some reason.
I’d be happy with this option and hope this is the method they choose.
That way, they arent forcing anyone to use their phones if they don’t wish to and they allow everyone to have basic access, post or paid, phone or no phone.
I have a feeling they wouldnt want smurfs, cheaters, etc. in QP, arcade or other game modes though as complaints may arise there too…
I see this as a comp only thing but will they do it? If they do decide to it may take months to implement.
Well another method they could choose is to just not require phone on OW1 paid pc, or paid digital only console OW1 accounts.
Since it’s only new accounts, or disc-only console accounts that need something “tangible” to bind their account to, if you need to ban it.
Crap, I’d fall under the disc…lol
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.