The reason why they implemented the SMS is because of consoles lol. Because they know how bad it gets.
Sure, new accounts have to SMS. But that doesn’t matter for console, because ALL previous accounts that were made for free (they count as premium, even though the game was bought once) will have free reign on their smurf accounts. I had 17 smurf accounts in my DPS placements alone (and these were only ones I could verify, because Xbox can only view xbox profiles to look at gamerscore and vice versa).
I’m a smurf btw (not by choice really, but because I gave up caring about the game. I never stomp people, but I am still ruining competitive integrity by only playing certain heroes on certain accounts to ‘practice.’ I was hoping OW2 would fix the issue so I can just chill or my main, but whatever.
People have families that played this game, a lot of them kids too young for phones. Only single people see SMS removal as a problem.
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Yup, i made a new account months ago and was matched with low skilled players in QP and I had to try SO DAMN HARD to not kill and be accurate and even then after 20 matches did the system detect me as having decent aim and still got matched with skilled players that i play with on my 2K hour account afterwards.
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Why is everyone mad, DoNt YoU aLl HaVe PhOnEs??!?
I think the way they did it is a fair compromise. Smurfs will get reported and banned and with all new accounts requiring a number, everyone has a limited amount of accounts they can smurf on before they’re finally forced to stop.
you can get new numbers that work with sms protect for $1. which according to my math is less than buying a new copy of overwatch 1 used to be. it’s now easier to smurf/ban evade than ever!
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you do have to wonder what sort of “engineers” they have left
it’s immediately obvious to anyone that has ever interacted with the real world that banning all “pay as you go” customers removes more than 50% of the market
especially amongst young people (the customers for this game)
and today’s “fix” only really buys time, the problem is still there
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If is true then there is no reason to complaining about the needing of phone numbers .
I would love to see a smurf report option then.
Eh I’m glad it’s being removed so that this game actually gains more players
It’s not removed for new players. Only existing ones from OW1
Every bugged SMS system advocate: “The other legitimate players that can’t play are a sacrifice I’m willing to make!”
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Not generalizing or simplifying what’s been said at all.
It’s like saying every user against sms verification: “wah wah me not happy”
A bit of nuance, please? Especially when talking on behalf of others.
There already is one.
Smurfing gives players an unfair advantage in game, and, according to Blizzard, anything that affords an unfair advantage is cheating.
Thus smurfing = cheating and there’s already a reporting option for cheating in game.
SMS verification is one thing… making said verification prohibitively expensive for a large chunk of your existing player base is another.
Within that population there will be cheaters, there will be smurfs, and there will be trolls. But their numbers are insignificant when it comes to the many perfectly ordinary players who suddenly couldn’t access the game they’ve been supporting for the last six years because they had the ‘wrong’ phone plan.
That’s like pulling up to a drive through and getting turned away because you’re in a used car. They had no business being so draconic about it. It was definitely the right decision to review the process and make it easier for existing players to access the game they’ve waited three years for.
Flipping their position on something this big, that they actually tried to enforce, makes you really wonder what the heck is going on at Blizzard.
Not exactly, cheating was mostly about using aimbots or see-through walls software in OW1. Smurfing was totally allowed. Now that the game is free to play maybe things have changed. But yeah I guess that’s the one report reason I’d use now out of all.
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You must not be very intelligent to make blanket statements like it actually works to get rid of smurfs. You do realize people can buy phone numbers for like 20$ a piece that count as post-paid phones right? It would be just like ow1, except instead of spending money on the game it’s just for a phone number. Not to mention it locked out something like 19 million people to get rid of smurfs, and locked entire regions out of getting the game. Personally I paid for ow1, never smurfed, and was locked out, and probably will never play the game again because of these Orwellian policies, to get rid of what maybe 1000 people who actually smurf out of millions. I don’t think it was to get rid of smurfs and I believe it was a ploy to stop poor people from playing the game to gain larger profit margins. After diablo immortal, the lawsuits, and pretending to be an inclusive company now, it would not surprise me that they are still doing extremely scummy things to make the highest profit margin possible. But hey as long as you get rid of the poors you get rid of smurfs amirite?
Because they didn’t think it through, even though we were telling them in advance every single problem that has happened.
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as far as I understand, accounts already made do not require numbers
So there can be no NEW smurfs. Just the existing ones now are forced to level up and get into their own ranks