Overwatch 2 is Removing Phone Number Requirement for a 'Majority' of Existing Players

Blizzard has announced that it will be removing phone number requirements for a “majority” of existing Overwatch 2 players.

In a forum post that was just recently published, the team has heard the complaints of the players, particularly with the SMS Protect feature, which was supposed to combat disruptive behavior. Instead, it became a barrier to entry for a number of players, especially those with pre-paid sims.

“We have made the decision to remove phone number requirements for a majority of existing Overwatch players,” says Blizzard. “Any Overwatch player with a connected Battle.net account, which includes all players who have played since June 9, 2021, will not have to provide a phone number to play. We are working to make this change and expect it to go live on Friday, October 7. We will update players once it is in effect.”

This update is expected to go live on October 7.

Blizzard says that they are committed to fighting disruptive behavior and players engaging in such could possibly be banned from the game regardless if their account is new or not.

Additionally, Blizzard also addressed a number of issues pertaining to server stability and account merging. The company has said that it has fixed the issue where players are seeing their queue numbers jumping around along with a patch to a server that is “critical to the login experience,” increasing reliability. A patch to address Overwatch 2 disconnection issues is also being worked on at the moment.

Account merging and missing items have also been addressed, as Blizzard assures players that the items are not lost, but are just taking longer than expected for some items to be migrated from the first game to Overwatch 2.