Overwatch 2 is out now, and some of those lucky enough to get past the hero shooter’s queues with 20,000 players ahead of them may still run into a bit of trouble. Players must tie their phone number to their Overwatch 2 account, but it seems Blizzard’s system won’t allow pre-paid phone numbers. Several Overwatch players posted on Reddit that they can’t access the new FPS game, as the system says Blizzard doesn’t recognize the provider.
That includes pre-paid plans from Cricket, Trac-Fone, and other popular providers, but pre-paid plans from major companies seem to function normally, for the most part. A few MetroPCS users said they had no trouble signing in to the game, while this writer uses a Verizon pre-paid plan and also accessed Overwatch 2 without issue.
So far, the phone number problem seems limited to the United States. Redditers who said they live in Germany, Russia, and South America say they can use their existing pre-paid numbers with no issues.
Other players said they used a pre-paid number on their accounts for the first Overwatch, only to find Blizzard removed the number and won’t let them add it back to the account.
While one Reddit user said Blizzard Support’s response was simply to “get a new phone,” the company hasn’t issued an official response to the verification problem yet. However, a small number of players reported they could verify their phone numbers using Blizzard’s authentication app instead of Battle.net.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
