You had it right before you edited it. Some get mad even when they do have the right info. LOL
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Lol, lets agree people will always be mad lol
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Yep.
Smurfs are what drove me away from Overwatch.
The promise of drastically reducing smurf numbers through requiring a phone number was what brought me back for Overwatch 2.
Now they’re letting the smurfs back in so it seems my time with Overwatch 2 will be very limited indeed (if I can even ever get in to play as I’ve still not been able to login since launch!)
How can it be small yet a majority? 
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It’s cutting into their profit. Tons of people that play either dont have phones, have shared phones (families/children)or have phones but they are not compatible with the system blizzard is using. I heard that a lot of people that use cricket for the provider are not being allowed to use their phones.
Blizzard is going to put them making money above anything else
Even just 5% of your playerbase being literally unable to play your game is such a massively greater issue than smurfing.
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Allowing people to play the game should always be the priority over any other system. This update applies to accounts already made prior to Overwatch 2's launch, so all smurfs will eventually be banned, it will just take some time.
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Did you bother to read my post? I’ll copy and paste the issue, because i’m not retyping it:
Console players have literally infinite accounts. If you made 30 Overwatch accounts on console before the cut off date, then you will have 30 accounts that can be used for smurfing without 2FA.
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Have I spoken to you before? Well glad we agree on something. 
Exactly. The good apples get to play and the ‘bad actors’ (as Blizz puts it) will eventually burn through their greenlit accounts.
I think the positives outweigh the negatives on this one
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I guarantee you an insignificant number will get banned.
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I like it because I am now able to play.
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That may be the case, however, that is indicative of a greater problem which overwatch has. The real change which should be made is a more prompt and accurate moderation system, or hiring more people to moderate the game. Implementing an SMS requirement for old accounts is just an ill-conceived way to solve a portion of a more significant problem, at the cost of many legitimate players being denied access to the game.Yeah, we’ve talked on a few occasions, but then again I haven’t been on the forums in like 6 months so I don’t expect you to remember me lol
You usually have some pretty “hot takes” (to put it mildly), but yeah, glad we agree on something 
Exactly. Also, the thing is, there’s been a lot of talk about how to get around the whole SMS thing. And, for me, it definitely boils down to “if theres a will, theres a way” and a lot of these Bad actors will definitely attempt those routes. So, why punish legitimate players in the meantime? It makes no sense.
I get why everybody is concerned with the cheaters and smurfs, I am too, but I don’t think it’s a good enough reason to keep actual OW players from the game. Especially those that have been playing and supporting the game for years, like I said in my previous comment.
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“You can’t cheat on console”? Says who? Didn’t consoles have a big thing of people getting DDoS’d and booted out by being targeted a while back?
Oh no that’s still a thing.
It’s a microsoft thing though, and they can’t be bothered securing the party system. You basically invite to an xbox party anyone and you can immediately DDOS them. It happened to me in plat when I was new to the game (imagine ddosing in plat) and they still lost 5v6 lmao. Blizzard doesn’t ban this because it’s not their problem. Same with ximming. If you could hack then sure, but there are no ‘cheats’ the same way as PC.
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I’m not sure, but erroring on the side of letting people play isn’t a bad choice when you are not sure.
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Smurfing is cheating as per Blizzard’s own definition of the term.
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Oh, well I didn’t even know that, because y’know, they never ban them. They don’t ban the free ones in OW1, or the ones that pay (which would make them money if they banned them)
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Agree. I’m sure there’ll be easy ‘workarounds’ to get cheap/spoof numbers that ‘bad actors’ will discover but at least it should cut down mainstream/lazy trolls, etc from spamming accounts…
Yeah, especially people that have like 1 account with hundreds of hours, no warnings, etc…
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no i simply live in the real world.
i can actually tell the difference between a gold player popping off in a gold match, and a smurf wiping a team in a gold match.
this is the key issue. people dont understand what it actually means or what it takes to be higher elo so someone vaguely does there job well for a single match and they glorify them as a smurf when in reality they are equally as hard stuck as they were.
half of em make new accounts too try and cheese the placements and end up in the same rank as there main account.