Released just this week on October 4, Overwatch 2’s launch didn’t quite pan out as Blizzard had expected. In a recent blog post, Blizzard has apologised for the myriad of issues that have been plaguing the game, saying, “the launch has not met your, or our, expectations”. As a result, servers were temporarily shut and Blizzard is hard at work trying to solve these woes and get players back into matches.
In the blog post, Blizzard stated that “millions of players have been enjoying the game” and while that should have meant a great start to this live-service game, many players have been left disappointed. In an effort to provide transparency, the blog post highlights all known issues, fixes Blizzard has made so far, and insight into what they plan to do moving forward.
We want to provide an update on what we have been doing behind the scenes to get more players into #Overwatch2 and make your play experience smoother.
Read more here https://t.co/YmTcxm3Zh0
— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) October 6, 2022
Phone Number Contention
One of Overwatch 2’s most contentious issues is the fact that it requires a phone number to play. This raised many problems with those that do not own a phone or the fact that many prepaid phone packages simply didn’t work. As a result, Blizzard has promised that “anyone with a connected Battle.net account will not have to provide a phone number to play”. They are currently working on this change and expect it to be available today, October 7. Players will be updated when this happens.
Stability Issues
Queues, server crashes, and stability are next on Blizzard’s list. They stated that queue numbers have been jumping around for many players, “going from a small number to a larger number”, and this is because there are in fact two queues, one through Battle.net and one through the game. This process was supposed to be invisible to players. To ease frustration, Blizzard has promised to simplify the process so that “players should only be experiencing one queue before entering the game”.
However, stability and server crashes are a little more difficult to contend with, and it may be some time until Overwatch 2’s servers are fully up to player expectations. A recent patch has attempted to fix stability and seems to have improved the reliability of logging in, but Blizzard is still working on a fix to stop players from randomly being disconnected. Server crashes, it seems, are being caused primarily by the number of players being too great to handle. Blizzard is currently working on “adding new nodes to ease the pressure on the database”, but it’s a slow process and they want to take their time to as not to “cause any further disruption”.
Hopefully players can get stuck back into the action soon.
Lost Items and DDoS Attacks
Many players have also complained about missing items and/or data when logging in to Overwatch 2. Blizzard has promised that all data and items are still there – they have not been permanently lost – and the reason behind this is that players have “not yet completed their account merge”. Completing this should solve the issue, but if not, then it’s because it is taking longer than expected to populate items from Overwatch to Overwatch 2. Blizzard has promised to provide more updates to this later down the line.
And lastly, things were made exponentially worse by repeated DDoS attacks against the game. These “made the environment in which we [Blizzard] work on these issues more challenging”. However, they have not stopped Blizzard from coming up with new solutions, and there haven’t been any attacks since. Blizzard seems to be working hard and heading in the right direction, so hopefully it won’t be too long before all this can be put behind us and players can jump into Overwatch 2 without having to worry about anything disrupting their session.
Unlocking new heroes and skins may be a challenge.
In other news, those that are able to get into a game on Overwatch 2 can expect to be playing for up to seven months in order to obtain a legendary skin.
