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'Overwatch 2' moderation tools include voice chat transcriptions and SMS verification (2FA)

Uiki

Uiki

Member
Miles708 said:
I get that and I agree with you there, you have to plan measures against cheaters, that's correct and fine.
My point is that, between straight-up malware to install and personal identifiable information to give up, the solutions to "cheating" are worse than the problem itself.

Let's not forget, you're giving your real personal info (and probably access to your machine and files, with certain bollocks "anti-cheat software") just to play a shooter game online with randos. There's a profound disparity between the "price" you pay, and the advantage you get.

I mean, there are a lot of games out there. Let's not normalize this kind of behaviour, shall we?
Click to expand...
Oh, for sure it's a worse problem than cheating itself. But there's no solution.. you just choose the lesser of evils. If it's just a phone number (considering how easy it is to fake anyway) i'm ok with it. A kernel anticheat, especially when the anticheat is the only measure take... is problematic.
 
Uiki

Uiki

Member
SJRB said:
How can anyone be okay with this? They're going to record literally everything you say when playing the game.

The fuck is wrong with you?
Click to expand...
Isn't riot doing the same with valorant? I remember voice chat being off for russian people because russian laws prohibited the recordings to be stored by riot.
 
L

Lasha

Member
Pallas said:
What’s stopping these “disruptive” players from using services like Google voice or some other VoIP to avoid giving out their real phone number?
Click to expand...

Technology. Virtual numbers can be easily detected and blocked from receiving verification SMS. Most countries require ID to buy new numbers of any type. The restriction acts as a reasonable barrier. Some countries also put limits on the number of prepaid numbers registered to each ID.
 
The Cockatrice

The Cockatrice

Member
yurinka said:
Nah, cheaters could bypass this by buying phone cards. It would be useful to collect personal data from their players that later can sell to marketing companies and secret service intelligence agencies.
Click to expand...

Still good. Cheaters have to keep buying stuff, eventually that shit gets old. Wont be worth it, especially not on a game like Overwatch anyway. At least on PUBG/CSGO cheaters keep playing to earn crates and shit to sell, but OW2 has no benefits.
 
tvdaXD

tvdaXD

Member
Y'all don't mind intrusive anti-cheats but a phone number for a SMS verification is too much? Give me a break, with how big gaming is getting this is a good development.
Guess you all finally have to behave yourselves a bit online from now on, or go play something else.
 
Y0ssarian

Y0ssarian

Banned
vhW9YGb.gif
 
nightmare-slain

nightmare-slain

Member
no prepaid numbers? i get it but not everyone is on a contract number.

i pay £10/month for a bundle but it's still essentially a prepaid/payg number because if i drop that bundle then i'm payg. i could easily maybe multiple phone number accounts if i wanted. i mean...i do have a secondary number which is my work number. so if i were a cheater/smurf what's stopping me making a 3rd?

so there is no guarantee that my number will work even if i did want to give them it?

edit: wouldn't it be easier and more effective to record IP addresses and ban VPNs? it's much harder and more expensive to change your IP than a phone number.
 
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Jaybe

Jaybe

Gold Member
Another notable feature of Defense Matrix is the addition of audio transcriptions for problematic voice chat recordings and automated review tools for the resulting text. The transcription process relies on players reporting abusive speech as it happens — but once someone is reported, this system collects a temporary recording of the match's voice chat and transcribes it to text. That text is then analyzed by Blizzard's existing AI-driven abuse-detection tools.
Click to expand...

AI-driven ban hammer with no retained evidence or recourse.
 
Generic

Generic

Member
nightmare-slain said:
no prepaid numbers? i get it but not everyone is on a contract number.

i pay £10/month for a bundle but it's still essentially a prepaid/payg number because if i drop that bundle then i'm payg. i could easily maybe multiple phone number accounts if i wanted. i mean...i do have a secondary number which is my work number. so if i were a cheater/smurf what's stopping me making a 3rd?

so there is no guarantee that my number will work even if i did want to give them it?

edit: wouldn't it be easier and more effective to record IP addresses and ban VPNs? it's much harder and more expensive to change your IP than a phone number.
Click to expand...
What if I have dynamic IPs?
 
Pallas

Pallas

Member
Lasha said:
Technology. Virtual numbers can be easily detected and blocked from receiving verification SMS. Most countries require ID to buy new numbers of any type. The restriction acts as a reasonable barrier. Some countries also put limits on the number of prepaid numbers registered to each ID.
Click to expand...
True, I guess it depends if ActiBlizzard will disallow VoIP’s. There are other ways though, but VoIP’s are probably the easiest/cheapest method of getting a phone number I guess? Could be completely wrong on this.
 
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Uiki

Uiki

Member
nightmare-slain said:
no prepaid numbers? i get it but not everyone is on a contract number.

i pay £10/month for a bundle but it's still essentially a prepaid/payg number because if i drop that bundle then i'm payg. i could easily maybe multiple phone number accounts if i wanted. i mean...i do have a secondary number which is my work number. so if i were a cheater/smurf what's stopping me making a 3rd?

so there is no guarantee that my number will work even if i did want to give them it?

edit: wouldn't it be easier and more effective to record IP addresses and ban VPNs? it's much harder and more expensive to change your IP than a phone number.
Click to expand...
Not everyone has static ip. Hell, where I live you need to pay to have a static ip. Everyone as a dynamic ip by default. And especially with modern infrastructure, static ips are shared between batches of users. You can ban someone from a service and preventing access to a totally different person. Source: it was common occurence for fastweb users 10ish years ago.
 
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MarkMe2525

MarkMe2525

Member
Gamers: Developers need to come up with effective ways to mitigate cheaters!!! Cheaters ruin game!!

Developers introduce mechanisms that help mitigate cheaters.

Gamers: OOMMMMGGGGGGGGRRRHHHHH!!!!!
 
L

Lasha

Member
Pallas said:
True, I guess it depends if ActiBlizzard will disallow VoIP’s. There are other ways though, but VoIP’s are probably the easiest/cheapest method of getting a phone number I guess? Could be completely wrong on this.
Click to expand...

Voip for MFA is blocked by most of big tech. You can get voip numbers which receive auth sms but those are generally not free and have their own identification requirements. That's why mobile numbers are useful to use for identity without requiring actual identification.
 
T

Three

Member
Uiki said:
Oh, for sure it's a worse problem than cheating itself. But there's no solution.. you just choose the lesser of evils. If it's just a phone number (considering how easy it is to fake anyway) i'm ok with it. A kernel anticheat, especially when the anticheat is the only measure take... is problematic.
Click to expand...
You can't fake a phone number unless you have a disposable pay as you go sim. It will send a code via sms to confirm it's a phone number you have.
 
Pallas

Pallas

Member
MarkMe2525 said:
Nothing. It's not a full proof system obviously, it's one of many mechanisms to help curve the numbers of cheaters and boosters. There is no gotcha moment here. Did you think that no one thought of that before you posted this question?
Click to expand...
Wasn’t aiming for a “gotcha” moment though, it was a honest question.
 
Uiki

Uiki

Member
Three said:
You can't fake a phone number unless you have a disposable pay as you go sim. It will send a code via sms to confirm it's a phone number you have.
Click to expand...
Plenty of free or paid (something like 1$) services that are able to do that.

The point here is not to stop cheaters with a phone number. The point is to put as many obstacles as possible to make the act of creating a new account not worth in the long run. Hardcore cheaters are gonna go to insane lenghts to cheat anyway. I don't know where you live but here (I hear they are calling it "fucking italy" nowadays) getting a sim is as easy as it gets even without "proper" channels.

Blizzard is approching the problem in the right way (cod/warzone is not). You need multiple levels of stuff to combat cheating.. and the anticheat is the last line of defence.
 
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ANIMAL1975

ANIMAL1975

Member
Fuz said:
And new Overwatch 2 accounts will have to unlock old heroes

[/URL]

[/URL]

They keep digging the grave. At this point feels like they're trying to sabotage it.
I also don't even think it's legal to record voice chat, in Europe.

Let's be stated for the record that whoever gives his phone number away like this is an idiot who's bringing down us all.
Click to expand...
555 611366
 
DaGwaphics

DaGwaphics

Member
I'm taking it this is an anti-cheater/bullying thing. Where they are trying to make it harder for users to create multiple accounts. Doesn't sound like it will be popular though.
 
T

Three

Member
Uiki said:
If it's just a phone number (considering how easy it is to fake anyway) i'm ok with it.
Click to expand...

Uiki said:
The point is to put as many obstacles as possible to make the act of creating a new account not worth in the long run.
Click to expand...

Yeah, you're right but I mean these are contradictory, no? If a phone number is, as you say, easy to fake then you haven't put up much of an obstacle at all. I don't think faking a phone number is all that easy but the serial cheaters can get a pay as you go sim if they are that desperate, they just have to wait a couple of days for it to arrive.
 
Uiki

Uiki

Member
Three said:
Yeah, you're right but I mean these are contradictory, no? If a phone number is, as you say, easy to fake then you haven't put up much of an obstacle at all. I don't think faking a phone number is all that easy but the serial cheaters can get a pay as you go sim if they are that desperate, they just have to wait a couple of days for it to arrive.
Click to expand...
The phone number thingy is not design to stop the hardcore cheater.. it's design to stop the kid from downloading cheats from youtube and making multiple accounts without barriers of entry. It's just one mesure. You combat cheats with a (large) number of "tricks" like the phone number. Anticheat, AI, moderators, stuff like csgo overwatch, server side design, kernel and memory watchers.. hell, monetary entry like paying 40 bucks for a new copy is one of the better ones.
5 or 6 years ago valve tried to read your dns entries to see if you visited providers of cheats via vac. People flipped out and they reverted back the changes (i think gaben went on reddit to explain why). Now they are giving you a "prime" status taking into account ALL of your steam profile and matching you with players around the same tiers. New accounts -> low status -> not trusted. Hell, csgo is free.. but you need to pay 12 bucks to play competitive.

Private cheats come with a phone number, usually. If you want to cheat you will.. especially when there's monetary gain behind people doing well in game or while streaming. There are no barriers they can put up to stop it.
 
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Interfectum

Interfectum

Member
Not really bothered by this, basic 2FA shit. What's funny is this story reminded me Overwatch 2 is releasing soon. This game has no hype behind it.
 
emmerrei

emmerrei

Member
On CS:GO was a welcome addition to the game. But at it's core wasn't needed to play, and it was implemented even before cs:go got free2play. Basically, trusted accounts, who had a lot of hours + bought the game + phone connected were much likely to play with other "premium" users, potentially avoiding all the cheaters, smurfs or just "toxic" players, but i have no problem with them, especially in cs:go.
 
ManaByte

ManaByte

Rage Bait Youtuber
Uiki said:
For anyone that's interested



This is valve explaining the philosophy behind stuff like a phone number.
Click to expand...


You're making great posts in this thread. Most don't care. They just look at the OP and hit reply in rage.
DaGwaphics said:
I'm taking it this is an anti-cheater/bullying thing. Where they are trying to make it harder for users to create multiple accounts. Doesn't sound like it will be popular though.
Click to expand...

SMS protect has been a thing on Battle.net for YEARS. Guilds in WoW limit guild bank access to accounts with it active. Overwatch 2, because it's 100% free to play and anyone can make a burner account, requires it to prevent the Smurf accounts and cheating that the first game has been plagued with for years to this point. Where people had to PAY to make a Smurf account in the first game, OW2 removes that barrier; so it needed another - requiring the account to have 2FA turned on.

But we have an OP here that fails to explain ANY of this and just posts outrage bait to enrage people into shitposting:
  • It's a F2P shooter where the original game had a massive Smurf account problem, so they're requiring people to use 2FA to prevent that.
  • Yea no shit new players have to pay for what old players had to pay for.
  • Both Xbox and PlayStation record your party chat for moderation purposes (and yes that's BS, and yes people were mad when that was revealed) but that is conveniently memory-holed in this instance when people use it as an excuse to not play OW2 while they still play games on their consoles that do the exact same thing.
Most smart people enable 2FA on games that support it.
 
Lucifers Beard

Lucifers Beard

Member
Fuz said:
How cute, so naïve.
Let's just gloss over that they shouldn't have nor require those data, but
1- I want to see how people eventually check & prove they are.
2- The fines for those infractions are MUCH LOWER than what they gain from them.
Click to expand...
We haven’t actually got to the part where they request your phone number so we shouldn’t just assume that they will use it for marketing purposes. Article 13 of the GDPR states that individuals should be informed of the processing at the point of data collection.

This means that when they collect your phone number (if you’re in the UK or EU) they must explain the use of that number. If they want to use your number for direct marketing purposes via SMS, they must have your consent to do so. To be even more clear, consent is not valid if it is a precondition of a service ie. They cannot force you to receive direct marketing to play their game.

I’m aware that some companies already use consent as a precondition, Blizzard are very high profile however, I can’t see them taking a risk like that.

Once they ask for the phone number, we can revisit this conversation. Source? I’m a DPO and work with the legislation day to day.
 
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Ev1L AuRoN

Ev1L AuRoN

Member
So, we will have access to the new roster but need to unlock the old heroes, or we will rotate free heroes and have to unlock them by exp or preferentially money like League of Legends?
Not looking good, sell me the game and be done with it. As for the phone number it won't work on my country, here you can get a new pre-paid number for as low as 1 dollar, even free.
 
T

Three

Member
Lucifers Beard said:
If they want to use your number for direct marketing purposes via SMS, they must have your consent to do so. To be even more clear, consent is not valid if it is a precondition of a service ie. They cannot force you to receive direct marketing to play their game.

Once they ask for the phone number, we can revisit this conversation. Source? I’m a DPO for many organisations.
Click to expand...
I don't think they will send you sms messages to sell you things but the current privacy policy seems to suggest they can use your phone number as a source of personally identifiable information and use that for marketing and surveys. Would the current privacy policy need to be changed in that case or would it be a checkbox that needs to be implemented?
 
DaGwaphics

DaGwaphics

Member
ManaByte said:
You're making great posts in this thread. Most don't care. They just look at the OP and hit reply in rage.


SMS protect has been a thing on Battle.net for YEARS. Guilds in WoW limit guild bank access to accounts with it active. Overwatch 2, because it's 100% free to play and anyone can make a burner account, requires it to prevent the Smurf accounts and cheating that the first game has been plagued with for years to this point. Where people had to PAY to make a Smurf account in the first game, OW2 removes that barrier; so it needed another - requiring the account to have 2FA turned on.

But we have an OP here that fails to explain ANY of this and just posts outrage bait to enrage people into shitposting:
  • It's a F2P shooter where the original game had a massive Smurf account problem, so they're requiring people to use 2FA to prevent that.
  • Yea no shit new players have to pay for what old players had to pay for.
  • Both Xbox and PlayStation record your party chat for moderation purposes (and yes that's BS, and yes people were mad when that was revealed) but that is conveniently memory-holed in this instance when people use it as an excuse to not play OW2 while they still play games on their consoles that do the exact same thing.
Most smart people enable 2FA on games that support it.
Click to expand...

Ultimately, I dislike any user accounts outside my primary Xbox/Steam/PS accounts. Devs should be able to track my progress and stats by that value alone and not require me to create random accounts that I'll never remember 10 minutes after creating them anyway. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

But, it is obvious that we've moved passed that.
 
Calverz

Calverz

Member
Fuz said:
And new Overwatch 2 accounts will have to unlock old heroes

www.engadget.com

'Overwatch 2' moderation tools include voice chat transcriptions and SMS verification

Overwatch 2's new mod system includes SMS verification, the removal of general chat from menus, and transcriptions for reported voice chat audio.
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com

www.pcgamer.com

New Overwatch 2 accounts have to unlock old heroes, too

The old hero roster is free, but you'll have to unlock them if you never played the original Overwatch.
www.pcgamer.com www.pcgamer.com

They keep digging the grave. At this point feels like they're trying to sabotage it.
I also don't even think it's legal to record voice chat, in Europe.

Let's be stated for the record that whoever gives his phone number away like this is an idiot who's bringing down us all.
Click to expand...
Don’t Sony record voice chats on ps5?
 
Mithos

Mithos

Member
Braag said:
People gonne start getting burner phones just to play Acti/Bliz games.
Click to expand...
This year when buying/using "kontantkort**" in Sweden you need to register the sim/number to an name and address or it will not activate/expire.

**Kontantkort, you buy a sim, and you just "add" voice/sms as you need, no subscriptions, minimum to keep active 100sek/year (€/$10) added.
 
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Fbh

Fbh

Member
Can't you just buy a cheap SIM card almost everywhere in the world?
Not sure how much this will do against cheaters, then again I guess it was never about cheaters anyway.
 
ManaByte

ManaByte

Rage Bait Youtuber
Ev1L AuRoN said:
So, we will have access to the new roster but need to unlock the old heroes, or we will rotate free heroes and have to unlock them by exp or preferentially money like League of Legends?
Not looking good, sell me the game and be done with it. As for the phone number it won't work on my country, here you can get a new pre-paid number for as low as 1 dollar, even free.
Click to expand...
If you owned the original game you already have the old heroes.
 
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