Mixed feelings about this. I always felt bad for the prepaid phone users who were being blocked from the game. It seemed like a huge problem at launch, which got swept under the rug when they exempted the OW1 accounts. However, they don’t say anything about what they’re doing to fight smurfs and hackers using this to make new accounts.
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Still isn’t enough. They need to remove phone requirement completely.
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You can’t have a F2P game with literally zero barrier to entry. Banning accounts is the only recourse against smurfs and hackers. I’m not sure if they’re doing hardware bans, but even that isn’t perfect.
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Nah; every serious online game has it… its the only way to fight smurfs that are a pain in the backend and hackers.
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and then 2 weeks later you gonna get 4 chinese wizards with 98% crit accuracy on McCree, Tracer, Ashe and 76 every game
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I’ve been searching on whether they do hardware bans, and I’ve seen some indications that they do. But very little concrete detail. It seems like nobody reputable is providing any info about this. I’m sure all the hacker forums have a thorough understanding of it, but they don’t show up on the first few pages of a Google search, and I’m not interested in going crawling through the deep web.
This is how you know they are desperately trying to get back the “35 million” who tried to play at launch but all quit due to horrible balance or just plain greed.
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“Hardware bans” fail at the first sight of a VM. Or even just changing HWID on your devices. 2FA is the only reliable way to combat cheaters.
This isn’t good news.
I had that thought as well, this could be a sign that they aren’t getting the player numbers they like and they needed to do something to bring in more people. But it could also mean they spent the last month figuring out some other way to protect against smurfs/hackers while allowing prepaid phones to join. I don’t know.
There are a ton of people using prepaid phones. It was a very exclusionary policy. I’m finding mixed numbers, but this is what I see on Wikipedia:
Usage of prepaid cellphone service is common in most parts of the world. Around 70% of customers in Western Europe and China use prepaid phones with the figure rising to over 90% for customers in India and Africa.[17] 23% of cellphone users in the United States of America were using prepaid service as of 2011, a share that was expected to rise to 29% by 2016.[18]
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Very funny. They don’t care who plays so long as they get money.
Sure, they’re a business. But they don’t want people to quit because of hackers. There’s a balance they need to strike.
For the love of … PLEASE DONT LOWER THE RESTRICTIONS … ive NEVER SEEN a single hacker in OW1 BUT 4-5 already in OW2 !!!
45 days ago this game wasn’t F2P and nobody asked for it to go F2P.
And banning phone numbers aren’t perfect neither.
Hmmm I can’t think of any serious online game that forces it’s players to use phone numbers and no it’s not the only way to fight smurfs and hackers.
This is the kind of comment people make when they can’t accept some players being better than them.
People with decent aim in my gold lobbies? Must be a smurf or a cheater! Can’t possibly be someone with a background in FPS games or who’s been hitting the Kovaaks
You’re saying there’s a way to prevent smurfs and hackers when there is no requirement whatsoever to make a new account? What’s your proposal?
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You sound like the spoilt brat who IS NEVER satisfied
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do you have problem comprehending what people say ?
i’m saying without sms protection the game gonna filled with hacker.
this isnt a me problem, every decent competitive shooter have to deal with this
45days ago this game was dead 
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make them pay a fee for competitive mode 
Also there is already someone with like 7 or 8 accounts in the top 10 of the leaderboard T500 before this number change, so it changed nothing.
Far as I know, Paladins didn’t ask for my phone number, but I also never played ranked in that game, so I’m not sure if there’s a phone number restriction to access ranked play. Which if there is, imo, is the better way to go about it than making every single account register a phone number just to access the game.
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thats just an invite to hackers… good jab blizzard.