Blizzard apologizes for Overwatch 2's rocky start: "The launch has not met your, or our, expectations"

Overwatch 2 developer Blizzard has acknowledged the sequel's rocky launch, apologizing to players and outlining how it plans to improve.

As addressed in a post on the Blizzard Forums, a community manager says: "Yesterday was an exciting day for the Overwatch team — a day that we know you have been looking forward to for a long time." The post continues, "while millions of people have been enjoying the game, the launch has not met your, or our, expectations."

Lower down in the post reads: "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 we are working hard to resolve the issues you are experiencing." Before continuing on to say, "we want to provide transparency on the issues, fixes we have made so far, and give you all insight as to how we're moving forward."

Below this, the post outlines how Blizzard plans to solve the problems players have been having with Overwatch 2 since it launched a couple of days ago. There's currently a long list that Blizzard is aware of, but it has addressed the main ones in more detail in the post. 

First of all, Blizzard says it has decided to remove the SMS Protect part of sign-up, meaning Overwatch 2 players - with a connected Battle.net account - who have played since June 9, 2021, will not have to provide a phone number to play anymore. It's expected that this change will go live on October 7.

Next up in the post, Blizzard addresses queue Issues, server crashes, and stability. For this post segment, Blizzard says it has already released a patch for the server that is "critical to the login experience." This should have now increased login reliability. Blizzard has also said it is developing another server update that will "reduce occurrences of players being disconnected once they're in the game," which we've seen a lot of since the launch of Overwatch 2. 

Blizzard has also addressed the issue some players have been having with incorrectly locked heroes and items for existing players. Upon Overwatch 2's launch, many players reported incidents where heroes that should be unlocked and available to play as for existing Overwatch players were appearing as locked. Blizzard says that this can be fixed as quickly as logging out and back into the gam,e but it is also working on a more permanent fix. 

If you didn't know, a lot of the issues that Blizzard has been having with its new FPS game are due to a series of DDoS attacks on Overwatch 2 upon launch.