Blizzard’s long-awaited Overwatch 2 arrived this week, but the release didn’t exactly go as planned. Blizzard apologized for the launch issues, saying it did not meet the expectations of players and Blizzard. The studio also announced that it will be removing the phone registration requirement for many and provided an update on what is being done to mitigate server issues to help players get into matches.

In a blog post, Blizzard said “millions” of people are already playing Overwatch 2, signaling a strong start for the free-to-play game. However, “the launch has not met their expectations or ours,” he said.

“First, we want to apologize to our players. We expected the launch of Overwatch 2 to go smoothly. We hold ourselves to a higher standard and are working hard to resolve the issues you are experiencing,” Blizzard said.

Overwatch 2’s list of known issues includes a number of issues, but there are a few key issues that Blizzard wanted to address at this point, the first of which is the phone number requirement. Blizzard initially said the phone number requirement was part of an effort to combat cheating, but many people complained for a variety of reasons, and some prepaid phone plans didn’t work.

“We have made the decision to remove phone number requirements for most existing Overwatch players. Any Overwatch player with a connected Battle.net account, which includes all players who have played since June 9 From 2021, you will not have to provide a phone number to play,” he said. “We’re working on making this change and expect it to go live on Friday, October 7. We’ll update players once it’s in place.”

Accounts not connected to Battle.net and new accounts are still required to provide a phone number.

As for server issues and stability, Blizzard said it’s making progress here, but expect queues to continue for the foreseeable future. Queues for Battle.net and the game itself have been combined, but going forward, there should only be one queue.

“Players may have been seeing their queue numbers jump from a small number to a larger number. This is because there are two queues for players: one through Battle.net and one through the game. itself. This process is generally invisible to players, but it was seen in real time,” Blizzard said. “We’ve made changes to simplify the queuing process, so players should now only experience one queue before entering the game.”

Regarding stability, Blizzard recently released a patch to the login experience that has already been shown to increase the “reliability” of the login. Blizzard is now working on another server update to help reduce how often players get disconnected when they can connect. to a game

“Finally, the player database is getting overloaded, causing a cascade and causing a backup in the login system, eventually leading to some people being dropped from queues or unable to log in. at all,” Blizzard said. “We continue to add nodes to relieve pressure on the player database. The process of adding nodes requires data replication, which inherently adds pressure to an already stressed system, so we’re doing it slowly so as not to cause more outages while developers and engineers work on separate issues.”

“We are also currently speeding up queues to protect the player database as much as we can while we scale – this feels bad in the short term, but once it’s done it will greatly improve the player experience on multiple fronts in the future”. ”, she added.

Players have also reported that they are logging into Overwatch 2 only to see that some or all of their items and data are missing. The good news is that no items or progress have been lost.

Blizzard said this issue stems from players not completing the account merge process. Another factor is that items take time to complete from the original Overwatch to Overwatch 2. “In all cases, no player data was wiped or lost. We have a client-side fix for this that can’t be implemented until next time.” week, so we are exploring server-side fixes and will provide updates as more information becomes available,” Blizzard said.

Blizzard went on to say that anyone who has unlocked a hero but that hero is still showing as locked should log back into the game, and this will resolve the issue “in most cases”. Players can open a support ticket if they are still having issues.

Finally, Blizzard said that all of Overwatch 2’s launch issues were compounded by DDoS attacks against the game. “They didn’t directly cause any of these issues, they made the environment in which we work on these issues more challenging. We haven’t experienced any further attacks,” Blizzard said.

The Overwatch 1 servers were shut down on October 2 to prepare for the sequel’s release.

In our ongoing Overwatch 2 review, reviewer Jessica Howard mostly enjoyed her first few hours with the game, though she questioned whether it’s a true successor to the iconic original. “Where it counts, Overwatch 2 feels like a fantastic update to a multiplayer game with mechanics that allow for exciting skirmishes between teams of heroes,” she wrote. “However, as a separate entity and sequel, it stumbles.”