Blizzard reveals a suite of Overwatch 2 tools to fight cheaters and toxic players
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Loading... - Stefan Nikolov
- 28 Sep 2022
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The launch date of Overwatch 2 slowly approaches, bringing with it a new battle pass, a new hero, and, announced today in a blog post, a new anti-cheat, community protection, and moderation tool called the Defense Matrix. Named after the D.Va ability that allows her to absorb and negate incoming attacks, the Defense Matrix is a suite of features that Blizzard says are “designed to help protect the integrity of gameplay and promote positive behavior in Overwatch 2.”
With Defense Matrix, Blizzard is implementing several new account security and moderation tools, the biggest two of which are SMS Protect and voice chat transcriptions. Starting on October 4th, all Overwatch 2 players will be required to add a valid phone number to their battle.net account in order to play. Multiple accounts cannot use the same number at the same time, nor can players use the same number to create multiple accounts. Additionally, certain types of phone numbers, such as VOIP numbers, will not be permitted.
In an interview with The Verge, Bill Warnecke, Overwatch 2 lead software engineer, said that the idea behind SMS Protect is to essentially make it that much harder to cheat. In the days of Overwatch prime, the consequence of cheating was simply a banned account and, therefore, the threshold to return to cheating was essentially the cost of buying the game again.
“SMS protect focuses a bit on the bad actors and the players who are willing to use cheats and potentially are willing to cycle through many, many accounts,” he said. “Losing an account in Overwatch 2 is a much more significant penalty than it was in Overwatch 1.”
The team is also aware that SMS Protect might unfairly punish players who simply have multiple accounts. Warnecke explained that, in their discussions, the need to combat motivated cheaters outweighed the somewhat edge cases of multiple account players. RIP the tried-and-true tradition of “smurfing”.
Reminiscent of technology Riot currently uses in Valorant, Blizzard is also implementing a system that will record and transcribe voice chat audio. Read More...
