If you’ve ever played a competitive game then you’ve almost certainly encountered an abusive player.
I don’t just mean verbally abusive, I mean the player who quits the game, AFKs, or intentionally feeds the enemy team when they don’t get the role they want. Maybe you’ve encountered the player who dodges the match the moment their favorite character is selected.
Typically even if the game ended the moment they left, or if there was a vote kick/remake mechanism. You will have lost at least 2-3 minutes of your time, if not the length of an entire match.
As a child, maybe this is acceptable, you can just move on to the next match. As an adult who can only set aside enough time for one or two matches it’s devastating. It’s the type of behavior that you the good behaving, rule respecting, team player gets penalized for.
When there is no restriction on just creating new accounts, these negative types of players just create a new account after they get banned or penalized and continue being negative players.
Increasingly these new accounts are being sold for $0.50 to $3.00, pre made with the tutorial missions completed, so that these negative players can spend a tiny amount of money and jump right into ruining another persons night.
I hope all multiplayer games start to add in this type of requirement. Bad behavior should be punished in an enforceable way.
I don't understand why you'd think requiring a phone number would fix any of this. The incentives are still against you. I still play games occasionally and I deeply understand the frustration when the two hours you can afford to play in a week are utterly ruined intentionally by a thirteen year old child not getting his way. Your misjudgement is that the game company would eventually ban those accounts or at least only let you play against nice players after you've accumulated enough trust. Riot, for example, once said that they have all the data to only match the horrible, toxic people against each other and let everyone else have a great time, but they will never implement it in their system. All of those toxic players have a massive amount of value to them because of the money they spent, pooling them against each other would tank engagement and thus sales. So while you might be disincentived to play their game because of your past experiences, you're worth less to the company than the 10% ruining every other game for you.
In my opinion valve fixed this problem a lot better with their counter strike lobby system. In that game, you can mark yourself "searching" like in other competitve games, but you have the option to not be thrown into a round directly but to have other players invite you to their team. You can then check their profiles and chat with them a bit to see what kind of people they are. Games that where ruined by my own team have become so rare that they can neglected when planning my evening, which has become the most important reason for me to start counter strike instead of other competitive games.
There might be other options to improve the average match experience that I'm not aware of, but essentially outsourcing the player base moderation to the players in question seems like the best option I've encountered yet.
By far the biggest issue isn't just toxic accounts, but "smurf" accounts. Alternative accounts where players don't want to risk their incredibly high rank so they play on an account they "don't care about". You end up. With top 1% players playing at the median bell curve with average players.
You then end up with one player who can solo an entire enemy team of 6, dominating the game; OR being incredibly toxic to his team for not meeting his expectations and throwing the game.
It takes 1 player per match to ruin it for everyone else. In Overwatch, if 10% of accounts were smurfs, you statistically would have at least one in around half your games.
Players eventually can't progress and make progress to get better because the top 1% of players at 4500 SR gatekeep 2800 SR and above.
I couldn't agree more. It'll filter out the cheaters, abusive players, and early leavers. In terms of privacy, asking for a phone number is peanuts compared to the level of access Vanguard has on your computer. I think people are blowing this out of proportion.
> nonsense that ignores reality which no one who calls themselves a hacker (old school definition) would agree with is still top upvoted
I played Fortnite for 2 years at the start. Reddit posts with 50000 upvotes were complaining about "the cheaters", while posts about actual problems (weapon switch lag, bug where you edit a wall but it edits the wrong one, etc) were unacknowledged. The company even acknowledged the "cheating problem" (as any bad company would, regardless of if it's real). However, in my thousands of games, I've come across maybe 2 cheaters. What I did notice, is almost every random I play with complained about:
- shooting around corners
- flick aim
- stuff that cheats dont even typically do, like allowing you to bypass a highly specefic cooldown which would only benefit a highly experienced player who would beat said randoms even without cheats
And then we get all those big incompetent hardware review sites who can't even explain how vsync works writing articles about how there are so many cheaters in game 1 2 and 3.
Again, I have played competitive FPS for 20 years. When I'm in a game playing with randoms and it happens to be the 1/300 where a cheater ruins it, I noticed consistently what is unsurprising: my team mates act like this is the end of the world, want to shoot the cheater IRL, etc. This is because the average video game player is a bad sport and is always seeking for something to blame his losses on. Most people do not play video games for sportsmanship, but to consume a product.
Do you see the problem now? No matter what measures are added, you will still complain. I argued with the exact same hordes of entitled bigoted kids each time something like VAC or Punkbuster came out. The before and after situation of perceived cheating was absolutely no different. I do not believe for one second that 50 of you ITT are competent gamers and can discern cheating. Less than 10% of gamers can. If you're "an adult with other things to do", you most certainly can't. So why do you really want phone identification, after knowing all of this? Answer that and stay fashionable.
Games aren't games anymore, especially multiplayer titles. _Especially_ competitive multiplayer titles aggressively marketed towards the widest range of players possible.
No longer are you simply one player among thousands, you are a uniquely identifiable individual who is allowed (or not) to participate only after identifying yourself to the platform stewards.
I don't think this is necessarily bad per se but it really escapes the realm of what I consider a "video game"
These competitive platforms with broad mainstream appeal are more akin to social networks, with strict rules around identifying yourself and policing of what's considered acceptable speech/interactions.
It makes perfect business sense but I wonder how many people are weirded out by having to explicitly identify themselves to sign up for a video game in the same way they would for a social network/plane ticket/hotel room/etc. It feels less like a game and more like a chore to me if I have to temper and guard my gaming experience because my real-life identity is on the line.
Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I'm being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame. We all know that phone number verification won't stop anybody with an ounce of motivation to cheat/troll/whatever. It's just an annoying mandated virtue-signal for the real players, as well as a tacitly implied threat: obey the rules, or your real-life UUID goes on the naughty list.
To be clear, again I think this makes some sort of sense for an eSports platform, but competitive gaming as a whole kind of escapes me (old school gamer, not the target audience). Maybe they could keep the phone requirement for their professional ladder only?
I yearn for the days when my relationship with the game publisher ended when I walked out of the store with my purchase.
League of Legends requires a phone number to create an account on the korean server, and there's reasonably widespread belief that that rule is a huge part of why the korean server is regarded as the best in the world. In 10 player competitive games being held hostage by a bad actor sucks. On other servers players who get banned just make a new account which leads to the game not even banning anyone since "oh they'll just make a new account." But in Korea if you get banned 3 times you're totally cut off, so people behave better.
> Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I'm being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame.
“Implement the real-name registration system for online game accounts — To this end, the "Notice" requires strict real-name registration, and all online game users must use valid identity information to register for game accounts.”
Strictly control the length of time for minors to use online games — It is stipulated that no game service shall be provided for minors from 22:00 to 8:00 the next day, and the daily period of statutory holidays shall not exceed 3 hours, and other hours shall not exceed 1.5 hours per day.”
It is still just a game though. For fun. Just because they want to posit their toy as a sport doesn't mean it is.
Luckily there's plenty of competitive games out there that are actually fun. The meatgrinder of matchmaking isn't actually the elite competitive environment these gamers think it is.
Real competitive video games are played IRL. Your online eSport PC game of the month does not compare to a real tournament at your local arcade/community college/bar/netcafe.
If your game doesn't have those, then it's probably a skinner box posing as a ladder with different colored badges as prizes.
I don't understand these games. With all the hoops you have to jump through just to start playing and then all the grinding to level up it seems almost like applying for and then working a job. Except you're the one paying, not getting paid. Is this actually fun or am I missing something?
It's a nice day outside, think I'll take my dog for a walk.
So if I walk into an arcade, and the owner stops and says “hey, we’ve had some incidents recently and you need to write down your name and phone number on this sheet of paper before you can play anything”, all the arcade cabinets suddenly stop being video games? That doesn’t really make any sense.
And if you're a console player you also get to pay monthly for the privilege of playing online. I miss when game companies didn't host their own games and you could just download the server portion and host it yourself (or rent a server). You can't even play a lot of the single player games/modes without a connection now.
> heavily policed speech.
I also miss the days when there was no communication provided in-game. It's unnecessary for the vast majority of games. And if we wanted that, we used xfire or something external to collaborate, outside of what has now become yet another walled garden.
As you say, these are social networks, and your ability to connect with other people playing the game opens all kinds of avenues for attacks and harassment as social networks. No one wants to put up with misanthropes just to play their favorite video game.
You can still have that relationship with your publisher, but if you want that in your multiplayer game, you have to go back to a day where people behaved differently on the internet. Those days are gone, and it's not the publisher's fault. It's ours.
The 0.1% of cheaters ruin those games so much for the masses that it requires actions like this. Unaddressed cheating will literally destroy a game and bankrupt a company.
It's sad that we have come to needing this kind of measures to prevent cheating, but the companies aren't the ones to blame for it.
I think you can still play unranked without a phone number, though. So, people who don't want to take the game seriously don't have to. It's a nice compromise, between that and fighting hordes of cheaters/smurfs/whatnits
"Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp."
Is this a bad think? F2P games are more lottery than video games. There would be statistics how many kids play it. In the best case scenario this would result in regulation of those practices.
This is way less egregious than Blizzard shutting down Overwatch 1 (which I paid for) and just replacing it with Overwatch 2. It's not even out yet and previews are not great, especially the new player grind - it seems designed to explicitly fish for the whales from the original game only. As someone that plays OW casually, I'm not happy that Blizzard is taking away something that I paid money for and giving me something that I do not want in the slightest.
I can still play CS:Source to this day, yet they need to shut down Overwatch because the sequel is out? Modern gaming is absolute garbage. This whole "you only purchase a license to play the game" nonsense is getting out of control.
> taking away something that I paid money for and giving me something that I do not want
In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game. It's no different from the many games which have previously gone free-to-play.
And to be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong to be unhappy, I'm saying that your framing is really just not accurate. Overwatch 2 is really just a peculiar name for Overwatch 1's free-to-play update.
> Likewise, (some) prepaid phones won’t work, and neither will VoIP numbers (which use IP networks to make calls or send texts). Likewise, a landline phone number won’t work either.
This affects me. If only I could give them a phone number.
I've had a Cricket family plan for 5+ years and their official support recommendation is to "change number or carrier". They offer no other authentication options - not even a credit card.
Am I going to pay an extra $50 a month to play your "free" game? No thank you. There are some people who prepaid for their early access content and are now fighting to get their money back on a game they can't even play. What a stupidly anti-customer company.
All this for a game that is a glorified patch of the previous one.
Meanwhile, Overwatch remains an immensely popular arena shooter, with frequent content updates and new characters. The type of game, like Team Fortress 2, that does not see "sequels" per say, but rather an ongoing evolution. The game is 3 years old.
What I'm trying to say is, in October 2019, the idea of "Overwatch 2" seems entirely, entirely absurd.
Not sure if you recall, but this was a HUGE fire-and-pitchfork controversy. #BoycottBlizzard became a real thing. I was among them, permanently cancelling my accounts, because that mattered to me.
Less than one month later, Blizzcon 2019 happened. If you remember the atmosphere at that moment, people weren't even sure if BlizzCon would happen at all. It seemed like it may simply be cancelled.
And what happened at BlizzCon?
Announcing... OVERWATCH 2. The sequel to the popular arena shooter. Will there be new characters? Uh, probably, but definitely there will be reskins! Okay, when's it out? Uh... eventually, one day, TBD!
That was 2019. Blizzard announced Overwatch 2 in 2019. The amount of time between that announcement and today is roughly equal to the amount of time between Overwatch 1 being released, and the controversy.
Am I insane? Is it not extremely, extremely obvious why Blizzard made the "surprising" move to announce a game that no one expected, and to this day has not been released?
As someone who put down Overwatch a while ago, after having actually enjoyed it for a while, I have no desire to pick up OW2.
Activision-Blizzard's merger tells me that 'Classic Blizzard' will never again exist, and that I should discard what goodwill I have left towards either publisher.
Overwatch's monetization model was not the best (they helped pioneer loot boxes, with no information on odds), and now they're locking new characters behind a Battlepass for OW2. F2P players will be able to unlock the hero eventually, but according to current leaks, competitive modes will lock out players who don't have all characters unlocked.
Diablo Immortal is something I've never played, but I've enjoyed listening to some of the drama. After Blizz cracked down on third-party sellers of the game's real-money currency, some people had their Eternal Orb balances go negative(!!!) when they removed the Orbs from their account. With a negative Orb count, players get locked out of participating in some of the game. The only by-the-books way to restore that functionality is to buy more Orbs from the store. One headline you can easily find is a player with over $30k worth of 'Orb Debt', as in, they would need to spend that much money in order to get to a balance of 0.
Acti/Blizz's monetization schemes have become more manipulative over time, and as of now, it's leaching into how people can actually play the game. Swipe your credit card, or you're gonna be behind.
Another can of worms, which I will label instead of open: Blizzard's recently-unearthed history of sexual harassment in the workplace, and etc etc.
The toxicity of random matchmaking has gotten out of hand. Whenever I decide to dive into a game of Overwatch, I'm rolling the dice on whether any of my five teammates will be misanthropes, and the odds are quite high these days. I shouldn't be subjected to that to play a team based game. Your ability to play nice with others should be a data point. To make that a data point, bans need to have teeth. Bad behavior needs to have consequences. We have to disrupt the Internet Fuckward Theory [1].
People who don't like the idea of phone numbers maybe should propose alternatives, because things are not fine the way they are.
Things aren't fine, I just don't think this will help.
Either accounts will still be buy-able, or the trolls will move on to some other annoying but not bannable strategy. It'll stop people from yelling slurs at each other in chat, but it's not going to solve people troll-picking Widow when they get salty.
I see a lot more of the latter than the former, and it takes moderation changes more than real identities to fix.
> People who don't like the idea of phone numbers maybe should propose alternatives, because things are not fine the way they are
"There is no alternative" is not an excuse to implement a bad decision, short of a need to physically save lives. Bad actors can get phone numbers for verification stupidly easily, meanwhile privacy continues to be eroded for the sake of stopping them.
The segment of HN's readership whose ideology is simply "privacy or bust" are unsurprisingly vehemently opposed to this, but for everyone else this is super reasonable... anything to improve the integrity of the competition so your progression feels fair and meaningful.
This is only necessary because Blizzard decided that IAPs + Free-to-Play (Overwatch 2) was worth more than charging customers outright for a quality product (Overwatch).
i can guarantee you that requiring a wired connection for ranked matches would do far more to improve your experience than any kind of blizzard panopticon scheme will.
People are prepared to put up with a lot of bullshit to get their gaming fix.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard could get more than a phone number out of me a few beers in on a Friday night. Especially if my friends where already signed up and ready to go.
Notably, all of Valve's competitive games—Dota 2, CS:GO, and Team Fortress 2—already require this. I'm not sure I support it, but even minor barriers help fight cheaters and smurfs.
Edit: Apparently they're not actually as strict as I remember, but all three definitely have some sort of a system.
I'm not sure where your getting this from, a phone number is _optional_ for CSGO, adding one is said to improve your "trust factor"[0], theoretically improving your matchmaking experience.
I don't believe TF2 has any sort of phone number system that I'm aware of. If there is one, it doesn't seem to function very well given the bot invasion over the last few years.
COD Warzone required phone verification to install when I tried. There was no way to play at all without getting a code sent to your phone. But yeah this is old news. This cancer started around 2010 when Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and friends out of nowhere required it on all of their services.
They do not require a phone number just to play the game, as Blizzard is doing here. They also accept more types of phone numbers and other authentication methods.
Makes sense. Valve already does this for all of their competitive games, it’s basically what you need to do to stop easy smurfing if your game is free-to-play.
prior to the separate matchmaker rating per role ("role queue") I had three accounts:
- one for support (which I'm pretty good at, main account)
- one for DPS (which I'm ok at)
- one for tank (which I suck at)
why? so I didn't ruin games when I played something other than support
I've not used the other 2 accounts since then, but out of curiosity I tried adding phone numbers to their accounts from my pile of free UK SIMs from various providers (my "backup internet" plan)
3/6 networks registered fine (no credit required)
quite how they expect this to stop smurfing/hacking if any kid in the UK can pick up 10 free SIMs from a phone shop and get 10 new overwatch accounts
I dunno. I truly detested being in competitive games with a "thrower" (someone who will blatantly try to sabotage their own team) and I imagine this will help quite a bit to mitigate the problem.
[+] [-] voidwtf|3 years ago|reply
If you’ve ever played a competitive game then you’ve almost certainly encountered an abusive player.
I don’t just mean verbally abusive, I mean the player who quits the game, AFKs, or intentionally feeds the enemy team when they don’t get the role they want. Maybe you’ve encountered the player who dodges the match the moment their favorite character is selected.
Typically even if the game ended the moment they left, or if there was a vote kick/remake mechanism. You will have lost at least 2-3 minutes of your time, if not the length of an entire match.
As a child, maybe this is acceptable, you can just move on to the next match. As an adult who can only set aside enough time for one or two matches it’s devastating. It’s the type of behavior that you the good behaving, rule respecting, team player gets penalized for.
When there is no restriction on just creating new accounts, these negative types of players just create a new account after they get banned or penalized and continue being negative players.
Increasingly these new accounts are being sold for $0.50 to $3.00, pre made with the tutorial missions completed, so that these negative players can spend a tiny amount of money and jump right into ruining another persons night.
I hope all multiplayer games start to add in this type of requirement. Bad behavior should be punished in an enforceable way.
[+] [-] f1refly|3 years ago|reply
In my opinion valve fixed this problem a lot better with their counter strike lobby system. In that game, you can mark yourself "searching" like in other competitve games, but you have the option to not be thrown into a round directly but to have other players invite you to their team. You can then check their profiles and chat with them a bit to see what kind of people they are. Games that where ruined by my own team have become so rare that they can neglected when planning my evening, which has become the most important reason for me to start counter strike instead of other competitive games.
There might be other options to improve the average match experience that I'm not aware of, but essentially outsourcing the player base moderation to the players in question seems like the best option I've encountered yet.
[+] [-] Gamemaster1379|3 years ago|reply
You then end up with one player who can solo an entire enemy team of 6, dominating the game; OR being incredibly toxic to his team for not meeting his expectations and throwing the game.
It takes 1 player per match to ruin it for everyone else. In Overwatch, if 10% of accounts were smurfs, you statistically would have at least one in around half your games. Players eventually can't progress and make progress to get better because the top 1% of players at 4500 SR gatekeep 2800 SR and above.
[+] [-] sanjayio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoorishBears|3 years ago|reply
Something you might not realize is in games that require phone numbers
> Increasingly these new accounts are being sold for $0.50 to $3.00,
This is still true: https://www.playerauctions.com/cod-account/warzone/
Unfortunately the best deterrent OW 1 has was being paid.
[+] [-] dbttdft|3 years ago|reply
I played Fortnite for 2 years at the start. Reddit posts with 50000 upvotes were complaining about "the cheaters", while posts about actual problems (weapon switch lag, bug where you edit a wall but it edits the wrong one, etc) were unacknowledged. The company even acknowledged the "cheating problem" (as any bad company would, regardless of if it's real). However, in my thousands of games, I've come across maybe 2 cheaters. What I did notice, is almost every random I play with complained about:
- shooting around corners
- flick aim
- stuff that cheats dont even typically do, like allowing you to bypass a highly specefic cooldown which would only benefit a highly experienced player who would beat said randoms even without cheats
And then we get all those big incompetent hardware review sites who can't even explain how vsync works writing articles about how there are so many cheaters in game 1 2 and 3.
Again, I have played competitive FPS for 20 years. When I'm in a game playing with randoms and it happens to be the 1/300 where a cheater ruins it, I noticed consistently what is unsurprising: my team mates act like this is the end of the world, want to shoot the cheater IRL, etc. This is because the average video game player is a bad sport and is always seeking for something to blame his losses on. Most people do not play video games for sportsmanship, but to consume a product.
Do you see the problem now? No matter what measures are added, you will still complain. I argued with the exact same hordes of entitled bigoted kids each time something like VAC or Punkbuster came out. The before and after situation of perceived cheating was absolutely no different. I do not believe for one second that 50 of you ITT are competent gamers and can discern cheating. Less than 10% of gamers can. If you're "an adult with other things to do", you most certainly can't. So why do you really want phone identification, after knowing all of this? Answer that and stay fashionable.
[+] [-] q-big|3 years ago|reply
This rather sounds like badly designed scoring rules.
[+] [-] branon|3 years ago|reply
No longer are you simply one player among thousands, you are a uniquely identifiable individual who is allowed (or not) to participate only after identifying yourself to the platform stewards.
I don't think this is necessarily bad per se but it really escapes the realm of what I consider a "video game"
These competitive platforms with broad mainstream appeal are more akin to social networks, with strict rules around identifying yourself and policing of what's considered acceptable speech/interactions.
It makes perfect business sense but I wonder how many people are weirded out by having to explicitly identify themselves to sign up for a video game in the same way they would for a social network/plane ticket/hotel room/etc. It feels less like a game and more like a chore to me if I have to temper and guard my gaming experience because my real-life identity is on the line.
Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I'm being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame. We all know that phone number verification won't stop anybody with an ounce of motivation to cheat/troll/whatever. It's just an annoying mandated virtue-signal for the real players, as well as a tacitly implied threat: obey the rules, or your real-life UUID goes on the naughty list.
To be clear, again I think this makes some sort of sense for an eSports platform, but competitive gaming as a whole kind of escapes me (old school gamer, not the target audience). Maybe they could keep the phone requirement for their professional ladder only?
I yearn for the days when my relationship with the game publisher ended when I walked out of the store with my purchase.
[+] [-] colinmhayes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lammy|3 years ago|reply
But of course. After all, we can’t risk giving certain cohorts of people too much self-determination before they’re fully indoctrinated into The Economy: http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2019-11/06/content_5449157.htm
(Google Translate disclaimer)
“Implement the real-name registration system for online game accounts — To this end, the "Notice" requires strict real-name registration, and all online game users must use valid identity information to register for game accounts.”
Strictly control the length of time for minors to use online games — It is stipulated that no game service shall be provided for minors from 22:00 to 8:00 the next day, and the daily period of statutory holidays shall not exceed 3 hours, and other hours shall not exceed 1.5 hours per day.”
[+] [-] akerl_|3 years ago|reply
The comment about broad appeal is also a bit confusing to me. Why do things stop being games because they're designed to be accessible to many people?
[+] [-] whateveracct|3 years ago|reply
Luckily there's plenty of competitive games out there that are actually fun. The meatgrinder of matchmaking isn't actually the elite competitive environment these gamers think it is.
Real competitive video games are played IRL. Your online eSport PC game of the month does not compare to a real tournament at your local arcade/community college/bar/netcafe.
If your game doesn't have those, then it's probably a skinner box posing as a ladder with different colored badges as prizes.
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
It's a nice day outside, think I'll take my dog for a walk.
[+] [-] keypusher|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cronix|3 years ago|reply
> heavily policed speech.
I also miss the days when there was no communication provided in-game. It's unnecessary for the vast majority of games. And if we wanted that, we used xfire or something external to collaborate, outside of what has now become yet another walled garden.
[+] [-] madrox|3 years ago|reply
You can still have that relationship with your publisher, but if you want that in your multiplayer game, you have to go back to a day where people behaved differently on the internet. Those days are gone, and it's not the publisher's fault. It's ours.
[+] [-] iLoveOncall|3 years ago|reply
The 0.1% of cheaters ruin those games so much for the masses that it requires actions like this. Unaddressed cheating will literally destroy a game and bankrupt a company.
It's sad that we have come to needing this kind of measures to prevent cheating, but the companies aren't the ones to blame for it.
[+] [-] spoiler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kubav|3 years ago|reply
Is this a bad think? F2P games are more lottery than video games. There would be statistics how many kids play it. In the best case scenario this would result in regulation of those practices.
[+] [-] rubyist5eva|3 years ago|reply
I can still play CS:Source to this day, yet they need to shut down Overwatch because the sequel is out? Modern gaming is absolute garbage. This whole "you only purchase a license to play the game" nonsense is getting out of control.
[+] [-] ohCh6zos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delecti|3 years ago|reply
In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game. It's no different from the many games which have previously gone free-to-play.
And to be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong to be unhappy, I'm saying that your framing is really just not accurate. Overwatch 2 is really just a peculiar name for Overwatch 1's free-to-play update.
[+] [-] legitster|3 years ago|reply
This affects me. If only I could give them a phone number.
I've had a Cricket family plan for 5+ years and their official support recommendation is to "change number or carrier". They offer no other authentication options - not even a credit card.
Am I going to pay an extra $50 a month to play your "free" game? No thank you. There are some people who prepaid for their early access content and are now fighting to get their money back on a game they can't even play. What a stupidly anti-customer company.
All this for a game that is a glorified patch of the previous one.
[+] [-] andy_xor_andrew|3 years ago|reply
Let me paint you a picture of October 2019:
In Hong Kong, this is happening, and it's a big deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...
Meanwhile, Overwatch remains an immensely popular arena shooter, with frequent content updates and new characters. The type of game, like Team Fortress 2, that does not see "sequels" per say, but rather an ongoing evolution. The game is 3 years old.
What I'm trying to say is, in October 2019, the idea of "Overwatch 2" seems entirely, entirely absurd.
Then, on October 6, this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
Not sure if you recall, but this was a HUGE fire-and-pitchfork controversy. #BoycottBlizzard became a real thing. I was among them, permanently cancelling my accounts, because that mattered to me.
Again, this was a BIG DEAL. https://www.pcgamer.com/brian-kibler-says-he-will-not-take-p...
Less than one month later, Blizzcon 2019 happened. If you remember the atmosphere at that moment, people weren't even sure if BlizzCon would happen at all. It seemed like it may simply be cancelled.
And what happened at BlizzCon?
Announcing... OVERWATCH 2. The sequel to the popular arena shooter. Will there be new characters? Uh, probably, but definitely there will be reskins! Okay, when's it out? Uh... eventually, one day, TBD!
That was 2019. Blizzard announced Overwatch 2 in 2019. The amount of time between that announcement and today is roughly equal to the amount of time between Overwatch 1 being released, and the controversy.
Am I insane? Is it not extremely, extremely obvious why Blizzard made the "surprising" move to announce a game that no one expected, and to this day has not been released?
[+] [-] gigaflop|3 years ago|reply
Activision-Blizzard's merger tells me that 'Classic Blizzard' will never again exist, and that I should discard what goodwill I have left towards either publisher.
Overwatch's monetization model was not the best (they helped pioneer loot boxes, with no information on odds), and now they're locking new characters behind a Battlepass for OW2. F2P players will be able to unlock the hero eventually, but according to current leaks, competitive modes will lock out players who don't have all characters unlocked.
Diablo Immortal is something I've never played, but I've enjoyed listening to some of the drama. After Blizz cracked down on third-party sellers of the game's real-money currency, some people had their Eternal Orb balances go negative(!!!) when they removed the Orbs from their account. With a negative Orb count, players get locked out of participating in some of the game. The only by-the-books way to restore that functionality is to buy more Orbs from the store. One headline you can easily find is a player with over $30k worth of 'Orb Debt', as in, they would need to spend that much money in order to get to a balance of 0.
Acti/Blizz's monetization schemes have become more manipulative over time, and as of now, it's leaching into how people can actually play the game. Swipe your credit card, or you're gonna be behind.
Another can of worms, which I will label instead of open: Blizzard's recently-unearthed history of sexual harassment in the workplace, and etc etc.
[+] [-] throwaway0x7E6|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madrox|3 years ago|reply
People who don't like the idea of phone numbers maybe should propose alternatives, because things are not fine the way they are.
1: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/325699-greater-internet-fuck...
[+] [-] everforward|3 years ago|reply
Either accounts will still be buy-able, or the trolls will move on to some other annoying but not bannable strategy. It'll stop people from yelling slurs at each other in chat, but it's not going to solve people troll-picking Widow when they get salty.
I see a lot more of the latter than the former, and it takes moderation changes more than real identities to fix.
[+] [-] Havoc|3 years ago|reply
Really? Out of a 100 players, 7 interact vaguely positively (gg, glhf etc), 3 are salty and the other 90 are silent.
[+] [-] ronsor|3 years ago|reply
"There is no alternative" is not an excuse to implement a bad decision, short of a need to physically save lives. Bad actors can get phone numbers for verification stupidly easily, meanwhile privacy continues to be eroded for the sake of stopping them.
[+] [-] moomin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrStonedOne|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dbttdft|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ajkjk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JadoJodo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odessacubbage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zppln|3 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure Blizzard could get more than a phone number out of me a few beers in on a Friday night. Especially if my friends where already signed up and ready to go.
[+] [-] mminer237|3 years ago|reply
Edit: Apparently they're not actually as strict as I remember, but all three definitely have some sort of a system.
[+] [-] exrook|3 years ago|reply
I don't believe TF2 has any sort of phone number system that I'm aware of. If there is one, it doesn't seem to function very well given the bot invasion over the last few years.
I can't speak to dota 2 as I've never played it.
[0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/00EF-D679-C76A-C1...
[+] [-] emsy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbttdft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legitster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wocram|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3qz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwilber|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blibble|3 years ago|reply
I've not used the other 2 accounts since then, but out of curiosity I tried adding phone numbers to their accounts from my pile of free UK SIMs from various providers (my "backup internet" plan)
3/6 networks registered fine (no credit required)
quite how they expect this to stop smurfing/hacking if any kid in the UK can pick up 10 free SIMs from a phone shop and get 10 new overwatch accounts
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glitchc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sushid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|3 years ago|reply