confirmed?
2020202002
yep still working for me
lol tell that to all of the people like “iT’lL sToP tHe sMurfS dOe!111!”
Well people were buying new copies of OW1 in order to smurf, and Talkatone is cheaper than that, so it stands to reason that they would not decrease but actually increase. I’m not sure if they have any protection against taking out numerous phone numbers. But the point is that so long as there is even one easy workaround, SMS Protect is fundamentally broken. Blizzard has sacrificed a lot of legitimate players for a system that doesn’t even work.
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I mean, if you’re willing to shell out $40 for a copy of OW1 I can’t see a $2-4 Talkatone number being a problem.
tbf, several of us were pointing out how trivially easy it is to bypass SMS validation these days, but we were called “doomers,” told we were overreacting, and that “it won’t stop all of them, but it’ll stop some!” 
At this point I’m just watching this all unfold exactly as I said it would literally months ago when the first hint dropped via the fine print on the watchpoint pack.
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If you’re one of the smurfs that smurfs to carry other people in exchange for money though the cost of a cheap phone line would be looked at as a business expense?
And if you’re someone that smurfs for fun then you likely only have a handful of accounts and probably could justify extra phone lines depending on the cost if it was THAT important to you to smurf?
I’ve spent most of m y overwatch time on PlayStation where smurfing was worse than PC. People didn’t even need to buy a new copy of the game to smurf n_n
There are two very simple solutions to this that I’m shocked Blizzard didn’t pursue, even if they believed that SMS Protect worked perfectly:
- Allow all OW1 accounts to play without a phone number. This is the bare minimum of common decency. Some of these accounts will be smurfs, but they’ll either rank up or get banned sooner or later.
- In addition to the above, give access to anyone who buys the Watchpoint Pack, now or in the future, at least until they find a better solution. This returns us mostly to the state of things in OW1 was which wasn’t that bad.
Price is just one aspect of it. Buying several copies of the game is not as hard as signing yourself up to multiple monthly contracts, with your name and financial information, just to Smurf. By that point, I can see a lot of smurfs just not bothering.
I’m also talking on behalf of myself since I used to Smurf a lot too. SMS verification would’ve stopped me in my tracks because I just couldn’t be asked to find multiple usable phone numbers to use for OW.
Yeah ive tried talkatone for android and bought the ad free version and all and it atleast doesnt work for android users
I’ve yet to encounter a Smurf yet on ow2
They’re prolly stuck in q
lol you could buy licenses to the game for $15-$20 from third party resellers. Only slow people paid $40 for the game xD
It didn’t work? Did you not get the text, or did you just get the post paid error message?