Blizzard will be taking Overwatch 2 offline again

Blizzard will be taking the Overwatch 2 servers offline once again to fix more of the issues that have cropped up during the game’s rocky launch. The company plans to shut the game down at about 9PM ET (6PM PT), and expects the downtime to last for an hour. This downtime will be the third in two days, as Blizzard had to take the game offline twice on Thursday.

Blizzard detailed the fixes in the works and some updates on a few of the bigger issues in a post on its forums. In Friday evening’s downtime, Blizzard plans to fix Watchpoint Packs not appearing as available for players who preordered them, and to address the LC-208 error that is preventing some players from logging in.

In Friday’s post, Blizzard confirmed that the change to its SMS Protect phone number requirements is now officially in effect. Originally, Overwatch 2 players were required to have a postpaid phone number registered to their accounts to be able to play. However, in response to players’ outcry, Blizzard said it would be softening the policy so that people who had played the first Overwatch with a connected Battle.net account no longer needed to register a phone number to play the sequel.

The company is also looking into the long wait times players might be experiencing before matches. To address them, “we are changing configurations within this system today and hope to somewhat shorten that wait throughout the day,” Blizzard said in the post.

Blizzard is optimistic about the fixes it implemented on Thursday. The changes “resulted in a quadrupling of our capacity and an eventual reduction in login queues overnight,” according to the forum post. Blizzard will continue monitoring things over the coming days, as “weekend gamer hours will be its biggest test yet.” Hopefully, things might be starting to smooth over for Overwatch 2.