Blizzard took the Overwatch 2 servers offline again to fix more issues that cropped up during the game’s rocky launch. The company shut the game down at about 9 PM ET (6 PM PT) and expects the downtime to last for an hour.
This downtime was the third in two days, as Blizzard had to take the game offline twice on Thursday.
Blizzard took the game’s servers down twice on Thursday to fix some issues, and it will do so again on Friday to patch things up.
Blizzard detailed the fixes in the works. In addition, updates on a few more significant issues were posted on its forums. In Friday evening’s downtime, Blizzard intends to fix Watchpoint Packs not occurring as available for players who preordered them and to manage the LC-208 error preventing some participants from logging in.
Blizzard confirmed that the change to its SMS Protect phone number essentials is officially in effect. Initially, Overwatch 2 players needed to have a postpaid phone number registered to their accounts to be able to play. However, in reaction to players’ outcry, Blizzard said it would be softening the policy so that people who had played the first Overwatch with a linked Battle.net account were no longer required to register a phone number to play the sequel.
The company is also looking into the long wait times players might be experiencing before matches. To address them, “we are changing configurations within this system today and hope to shorten that wait throughout the day somewhat,” Blizzard said in the post.
Blizzard is optimistic about the fixes it implemented on Thursday. The changes “resulted in a quadrupling of our capacity and an eventual reduction in login queues overnight,” according to the forum post. Blizzard will continue monitoring things over the coming days, as “weekend gamer hours will be its biggest test yet.” Hopefully, items might be starting to smooth over for Overwatch 2.
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is a video game creator and publisher founded in Irvine, California. An associate of Activision Blizzard, the company was launched on February 8, 1991, under the name Silicon & Synapse, Inc., by three students of the University of California, Los Angeles: Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce, and Allen Adham.
Since then, Blizzard Entertainment has assembled many Warcraft sequels, including the highly influential massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft in 2004 and three other multi-million-selling video game franchises: StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch. Their most recent projects include the development for Diablo III, Reaper of Souls; the online collectible card game Hearthstone; the multiplayer online combat arena Heroes of the Storm; the third and final expansion for Legacy of the Void; StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the multiplayer first-person idol shooter Overwatch; and the eighth evolution for World of Warcraft, Shadowlands. The games are executed through the online gaming service Battle.net.
On July 9, 2008, Activision integrated with Vivendi Games, culminating in including the Blizzard trademark name in the title of the resultant holding company. In addition, Activision Blizzard revealed the purchase of 429 million shares from bulk owner Vivendi. As a result, Activision Blizzard became an independent company. However, since 2018, the company’s reputation has suffered from poorly received games, controversies applying players and staff, allegations of sexual harassment and another transgression against leading Blizzard employees.