Overwatch 2 Update (October 7): LC-208, Account Merge, Matchmaking, and more fixed

Overwatch 2 officially launched last Tuesday, October 4, and unfortunately, it stumbled right out of the gate. Over the next two days, the game's servers were hit with DDoS attacks, which resulted in many players being unable to log in and also facing several error codes.

After deploying a few fixes during the maintenance on October 6, Blizzard took the Overwatch 2 servers down again on October 7 to address a bunch of issues pointed out by players and community members. With that being said, let's take a look at the Friday, October 7 update to Overwatch 2.

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Overwatch 2 latest server update fixes a lot of issues, including LC-208, Account Merge, Matchmaking, and more

The latest Overwatch 2 server update brought a lot of necessary changes. In the blog post, the community manager shared all of the issues addressed so far and promised more fixes down the road. with that being said, let's take a look at all of the fixes for Overwatch 2.

SMS Protect

Changes to phone number requirements are now in effect. As we mentioned in our latest status update, this means that the majority of our console community (players who already have Overwatch connected to their Battle.net account, including any console player who has played since June 9, 2021) no longer need to meet the SMS Protect requirements.

Any PC player who ever played the original Overwatch has this requirement removed. If you have an active customer service ticket for SMS Protect but no longer need it due to this change, please close your tickets 460—this will help reduce our customer service queues and allow us to help other folks quicker.

Yesterday’s Fixes

Yesterday’s server shutdowns were to help address two issues: the first was used to deploy fixes for some bugs relating to account merges and logins. The second was to conduct some upgrades to our databases (we described these issues in our last status update).

This has resulted in a quadrupling of our capacity and an eventual reduction in login queues overnight. We’re keeping an eye on this, particularly as we roll into the weekend when we expect more people to be logging in—early signs are good, the database looks healthy, but we will be constantly monitoring it. Weekend gamer hours will be its biggest test yet.

Account Merge

We’ve made progress here, and we believe we have a working resolution for the general merging issues. Some players who merged their accounts should now be seeing their full collections, but we still have many still in the queue to be resolved, and we expect more to be added to the queue as people log in for the first time over the weekend.

As we said previously, your collection is not lost, and with the database now updated, we now have more bandwidth to complete these merges.

Watchpoint Pack on Consoles

Console players who pre-purchased the Watchpoint Pack may not be seeing the items as being available—while some users are experiencing this on Xbox, this issue mostly appears on PlayStation right now. We have a fix for this that we plan to deploy in our downtime later today.

LC-208

We resolved a majority of these issues with our fixes yesterday, but the issue persists for a small group of players who are still seeing this error, which is preventing login. We have a fix for this that we are also planning to deploy in today’s downtime.

Matchmaking

Now that we’ve increased capacity and have a higher player concurrency, matchmaking systems are being affected, which means you may be seeing a wait before being placed in a match.

We are changing configurations within the system today and hope to somewhat shorten that wait throughout the day. We will continue to look into the matchmaking queues throughout the weekend to identify any additional improvements we can make.

Miscellaneous Client Crashes/Black Screen Issues

We have gathered reports around crashes happening in a few different scenarios here and there. We will continue to work on fixes for these issues, and hope to deploy them in updates coming as soon as today.

Thank You

We understand that the launch experience has been frustrating for many people in our community. We deeply appreciate your patience and thank you for your support, and we are laser focused on improving the Overwatch 2 experience for all players.

We’ll be back early next week to provide more updates on the forums, but if anything needs to be communicated in the meantime, we will post to Twitter to keep you informed.

Overwatch 2 is available for free on the Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and PC via battle.net. Interested players can jump right in and try out the game today.