from the because-we-must-sell-cell-phones dept.
Polyon reports that players will be required to link an SMS phone number to their Battle.net accounts if they want to play Overwatch 2. "The same two-factor step, called SMS Protect, will also be used on all Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 accounts when that game launches, and new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare accounts," the report adds.
As the name suggests, this requires SMS "texting". That means normal landlines, VoIP numbers, some prepaid cell phones, and messaging apps are not allowed.
From the report:
Blizzard Entertainment announced SMS Protect and other safety measures ahead of Overwatch 2's release. Blizzard said it implemented these controls because it wanted to "protect the integrity of gameplay and promote positive behavior in Overwatch 2."
Overwatch 2 is free to play, unlike its predecessor. Without SMS Protect, Blizzard reasoned that there is no barrier to toxic players or trolls creating a new account if an existing one is sanctioned. SMS Protect, therefore, ties that account to something valuable -- in this case a player's mobile phone.
SMS Protect is a security feature that has two purposes: to keep players accountable for what Blizzard calls "disruptive behavior," and to protect accounts if they're hacked. It requires all Overwatch 2 players to attach a unique phone number to their account. Blizzard said SMS Protect will target cheaters and harassers; if an account is banned, it'll be harder for them to return to Overwatch 2. You can't just enter any old phone number -- you actually have to have access to a phone receiving texts to that number to get into your account.
The report notes that Blizzard has refunded one player after they contacted customer support and said they didn't have a mobile phone, but it's unclear if this policy will apply more broadly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday October 04 2022, @08:11AM (5 children)
Ever since newer games started requiring the internet to work, I gave up on them. There's plenty of good fun to be had with older games that run standalone without calling the mothership.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 04 2022, @11:07AM (4 children)
Those older games also aren't microtransaction farms, and tend to have good single-player experience rather than emphasizing multiplayer to the point where single-player is barely playable. And of course they run nice and fast on modern machines, and don't take up much by way of resources.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EEMac on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:21PM (3 children)
>Those older games also aren't microtransaction farms,
Some older games aren't. But I'd like to remind readers that arcade games were literally microtransaction-based. You gave them 25 cents. You played a fun game for a few minutes. If you wanted to play again or keep playing, you gave them another 25 cents. Repeat for as long as you have quarters.
One of my friends got something like $10 in quarters and beat an arcade game (Altered Beast?). He was smarter than me, he got his satisfaction of beating it and never wanted to play it again after that.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2022, @01:54AM
It used to be when the game ended, it ended and you'd have to play again. Then in the 80s they learned to end the game with "Continue?" and give you a ten second countdown using huge numbers to up your anxiety level and spur you to scramble to keep feeding the box. What really dampened my desire for the arcade was when they made a quantum jump from a quarter to fifty cents. That just bugged me at the time and it really curbed my desire to go to the arcade.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Wednesday October 05 2022, @05:22AM (1 child)
The pinnacle of my Arcade experience was being able to complete Midnight Resistance [wikipedia.org] on a single coin. Admittedly it was a pretty easy game, but it was very satisfying nonetheless!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday October 05 2022, @01:13PM
It was a great game tho, not very long. But good. The music was brilliant. Even tho the C64 SID version was far superior to the arcade soundtrack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ9_PTEut9o [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday October 04 2022, @09:21AM (1 child)
First, if it will help cut down on cheating then good. I gave up online games several years ago because of cheaters.
On the other hand, I can't help but think they'll harvest these phone numbers to market me to whomever buys the database. And they won't just sell it to 1 entity, they'll sell it to whomever has the coin to buy it.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday October 04 2022, @11:38PM
Eventually they may come to realize that asking a paying customer to give them the phone number is detrimental to their business in at least two ways: lower sales and the liability created by the need to keep the data secure. The last one strongly depends on the penalties the govt impose for security breaches, so YMMV, but sooner or later the "frontier spirit" mentality in regards with privacy is going to fade [innovationaus.com].
The linked bears the title of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2022, @09:25AM (5 children)
I needed a different number recently for business transactions. A new sim was $5 which includes credit for one year. A cheap phone is all that is needed. Easy. My phone company doesnt really care what I do with the number so long as I dont break any laws.
At $5 per number, or cheaper, how is requiring a phone number anything but irritating regular users?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday October 04 2022, @12:04PM (1 child)
You have just pointed out a good technical reason why this is so absurd. Cell/Smart phones DO NOT UNIQUELY IDENTIFY PEOPLE. Quite frankly, if they ever do then I don't want to live on this planet any more.
All 2FA is is an extra step a "bad guy" would have to compromise or work around. Nothing more and nothing less. If one wants to add such an extra step, great. If not, then they should not be forced to.
Besides, there is no excuse (other than selling cell phones) for making these not work on voice telephones. I've used a couple of 2FA systems that call my landline, and that works fine for me.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:42PM
> All 2FA is is an extra step a "bad guy" would have to compromise or work around
Not even that if one has a phone with whatever banking/gaming software installed on it...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2022, @12:31PM (2 children)
Hmm, do you really need a new cell phone number and SMS service/plan? How about a free* Google Voice account? I use the phone number that Google gave me for texting. Occasionally it takes a while for messages to appear (half hour?), and the web interface (tab) needs to be reloaded every few days, but most of the time it works fine. Using Voice on a laptop gives texting with a real keyboard, straightforward cut & paste, ability to grab photos and store locally, etc.
* Free as in beer, but almost certainly not free as in freedom... Also, although it also does voice, that hasn't worked too well, due to crappy internet service here.
(Score: 1) by crotherm on Tuesday October 04 2022, @02:38PM (1 child)
I signed up for a Google phone number when it was first offered. I use it all the time for texting and only once was it rejected for not being a "real" phone number.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2022, @09:19PM
> I signed up for a Google phone number when it was first offered.
Me too, had my pick of many local numbers and picked one that looks like a "vanity number". At first I didn't use Google Voice for much at all, but then started using it to text and it has been fine for that purpose.
Solves one of the few problems I have from not having a cell phone. I only have a landline which gives good voice quality for working from home--cell service here is spotty.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday October 04 2022, @10:01AM
I kind of stopped playing World of Warcraft, Blizzards other flagship game, a couple of years ago. While they didn't force you to hook up a security token then they did reward you if you did. As I recall it now your characters got a bigger backpack in game and you got some cosmetic items and a in-game pet. At first it was one of those security tokens but then eventually it was possible to just do it via phone and app. Not sure now if it was just the app or if it was SMS messages. Still I guess it was a good thing and an incentive and since it was a game that requires a subscription they already had your credit card information, unless you paid with tokens or game-cards, so they might as well have your phone number to.
I have not played any of the Call of Duty games since probably the first or second installment. Modern shooters just don't do much for me. I guess the part that matters then is the multiplayer aspect as they shouldn't care about your single player experience. But multiplayer shooters have turned into data-gatherers so that you can gain all your achievements and score points to get more achievements and buy or unlock things. That said I would think those things are almost secondary to the possibility to just smash the banhammer and block people that they find misbehave. Which is very common in all kind of multiplayer games. After all you don't want to lose access to the game you paid for and all your in-game achievements to just start over again.
I wonder if "securing your account from hackers" even make the top 3 or top 5 of reasons they do it. I would think that gathering more user data, behavior compliance (trying to get the people with online tourettes that just have to shit talk all the time to behave) would score a lot higher then any evil hacker attacks.
Have Blizzard blocked all such services? There are several SMS forwarding services etc that receive the message and then send it on. They can send them to other phone# or the email etc. Disposable or burner phones are sometimes just not an option everywhere anymore. That said I'm not sure you would want to use some disposable number that everyone or anyone can use and reuse to receive codes for your game since then eventually it will get recycled and someone else could get those sweet promos from blizzard and hijack your account. But for a game that requires constant online-access to work it seems somewhat silly that you would need a SMS capable device. Why not just send tokens or codes to an email address? It's not like phones can't be hacked or spoofed.
On a somewhat related note it does appear to me that Google have started a real spree with this attach a phone to your account much more aggressively then previously. It had not been an issue with gmail for many years but just this fall I lost access to two accounts due to them now demanding a phone-number to help "secure" my account from the evil hackers, cause we all know it has nothing to do with their creepy as fuck data-gathering operation. I guess I'll reclaim them eventually in the future if I care enough. But I'm not giving them my real phone-number.
(Score: 5, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday October 04 2022, @10:10AM
If one followed the link in the article to SMS Protect I guess they didn't bother to hide the real reasons as they just state it (even in bold) 'Stop fraud and monetise all your A2P SMS traffic" and "This way, all your traffic will be recognized and monetized." The monetized part in bold so you know what is important.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 04 2022, @10:45AM
When Blizzard announced Diablo: Immortal [youtube.com], they got boo'd by their most dedicated fan base in large part because they specifically wanted the game to run on phones rather than on the desktops like they had pretty much always emphasized. And their response was "Do you guys not have phones?"
Activision plainly wants to get a toehold in the mobile gaming market, and requiring all their people to give them their phone numbers is part of doing that.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday October 04 2022, @02:07PM
Probably the only thing that I hate more than F2P is needlessly attaching even more personal data to a game, so they can monetize me even harder.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Touché) by Immerman on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:20PM (1 child)
A more accurate headline:
(Score: 2) by higuita on Tuesday October 04 2022, @08:48PM
and later, as you already have your phone with the game, you can do micro-transactions using it and "inform" you that you haven't played for 3h and probably want to came back...