Today, Overwatch will debut its latest animated short film for its newest hero, Kiriko, from TwitchCon 2022’s keynote presentation. Fans of Overwatch are invited to watch the official TwitchCon stream starting at 3 p.m. PDT to catch the full 9-minute cinematic.
Also kicking off today is the Overwatch 2 launch Twitch Drops program featuring rewards for Overwatch 2’s latest support hero. Starting at 2 p.m. PDT, players who link their Twitch and Blizzard accounts will be able to earn cosmetic rewards for Kiriko by watching any stream on the Overwatch 2 category. Check out the blog post here for more details on how the program works.
Blizzard will also be rolling out some fixes and game updates today for Overwatch 2, some of which will result in downtime. These fixes will address many of the issues players have been experiencing. Please see Blizzard’s “Known Issues” Forum Post for more detailsand this tweet from Overwatch on the estimated downtime.
- Down Time:
- 3 PM PT – Estimated to last for one hour
- Approximately 6PM PT, Estimated to last three hrs
- SMS Protect Update Forum Post Excerpts:
- We designed Overwatch 2 to be a live service, which enables us to be responsive to a variety of player feedback. We have made the decision to remove phone number requirements for a majority of existing Overwatch players. Any Overwatch player with a connected Battle.net account, which includes all players who have played since June 9, 2021, will not have to provide a phone number to play. We are working to make this change and expect it to go live on Friday, October 7. We will update players once it is in effect.
- We remain committed to combating disruptive behavior in Overwatch 2—accounts that were not connected to Battle.net as well as new accounts will still have to meet SMS Protect requirements, which helps to ensure we’re protecting our community against cheating. If a player is caught engaging in disruptive behavior, their account may be banned whether they have a new account or not.
- As a team, we will keep listening to ongoing feedback and will make further adjustments in this area if it is required.
- Fixes:
- Players are experiencing server disconnects
- Today we’ve patched a server that is critical to the login experience, this change has increased login reliability. Beyond queues, we’re in progress with another server update that will reduce the occurrences of players being disconnected once they’re already in game.
- We’re also adding nodes to ease the pressure of our player database being overloaded. Adding nodes requires replication of data, which inherently adds more pressure to an already stressed system, so we’re doing it slowly to not cause any further disruption.
Source: Blizzard
