The troubled start of surveillance 2 is now a full blown saga. In an attempt to address issues related to Torbjörn and Bastion, Blizzard announced today that it would Completely drag the characters out of some game modes. Don’t fret if you don’t see her the part is intended. While there’s no word on how long the characters will be inaccessible, the move is believed to be fixing Bastion’s infinite ultimate, along with a Torbjorn ability that was missing the cooldown. Somehow, Blizzard has created a whole new problem with this: a whole range of characters are no longer accessible to some players.
If I log in as someone who had previously unlocked the entire list, I now have 12 characters that I can no longer access. They are Doomfist, Sigma, Wrecking Ball, Ashe, Echo, Mei, Sombra, Symmetra, Torbjorn, Zenyatta, Kiriko, Baptiste, and Brigitte. Restarting the game didn’t help unlocking the characters, nor did restarting my PS5. The characters just kept the little lock icon, although today I played with some of those inaccessible characters. And looking at social media, I’m not alone with this problem: There are a lot of confused people who don’t know what’s going on are screaming at Blizzard to undo it.
“What’s up at Blizzard now???” one player tweeted while commenting on their inability to access their full roster. “I can’t play almost any of my mains,” said another with the roster issue.
This follows a week of other major issues in which Players were unable to log into the game at allhad trouble migrating their accounts from the start over watch, could not use prepaid phonesand bizarrely suffered a technical issue where the chat was somehow able to buy things from the store. While all of these issues have been fixed or improved, players keep discovering other bugs or unfinished assets. It all gave the impression that surveillance 2 feels more like an Early Access game than a full-fledged, polished, finished product. And since the developer has to drag entire characters, breaking the entire game in the process, it becomes harder to defend surveillance 2 even if it’s fun to play.
my boxcontacted Blizzard to inquire about this enormous bug. As it sounds, this isn’t the first time that some players have lost access to characters since launch, but the issue seems to be significantly more widespread than before. According to players who experienced the bug before today, it took about a day to fix.
Update 11:41pm ET: over watch went out for maintenance for an estimated hour and is back up now if you’re reading this. In a forum post summarizing known issues, Blizzard confirmed the bug with banned characters, noting, “This is caused by an issue with our servers tracking player progress. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible.” When I loaded the game on PS5 for the first time, I was able to access all of my previously unlocked rosters. Talking to other players it seems to be a mixed bag. Some find the problem is gone now, others still have their characters gone. As the locked roster was something some experienced ahead of tonight, this happened to spread massively after the initial Torb + Bastion fix. Your mileage may vary. While my roster is back, I now have an entirely new problem: I keep getting kicked out of games.
Correction 10/10/2022 8:38 pm ET: This post previously stated that if it’s 12 out of 34 it was more than half the list. However, players are reporting a different number of inaccessible characters than I personally experience.
