I’ll respond to this, but I’m also replying to another that noted how cheap phone numbers are. In the beginning, yes, they appear to be cheap. But that doesn’t last very long in my prior experience, the last multiplayer platform I used that used phone number verification blocked several VoIP carriers shortly after they started abusing the ease of getting numbers. This was super effective, overnight games got significantly better. Rinse and repeat, adding region locking of phone region to server region, etc… I know it’s not perfect, but you can’t forgo good for a lack of perfect. Every hoop removes a non-trivial amount of bad actors.

I’d rather have one game a week be annoying, then 3 dodges and 1 disconnect nearly every attempt at playing.

1. It's supposed to be easy go get new phone numbers. This is required for things like privacy, bypassing block lists that you got on for reasons out of your control, getting a new number that doesn't receive 1000 spam messages per day, etc. Basic stuff any engineer knows about.

2. Some carriers (1 in 50) require a photo ID to sign up, which is ass backwards. They even have brainwashed employees that answer "maybe something happened", when you ask "WTF? Why do you need photo ID now?". The idea that a phone number is a thing conveying some sense of liability and responsibility, is asinine.

3. Whatever problem you are experiencing is over represented. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33038531 . Yes, people disconnect, shit happens. Get over it. You are literally asking the world to become more police state so "you can enjoy your video game".

4. Your "there is no alternative" bullshit has been covered by other posters in this thread.

Let's actually break down this dodge and disconnect thing a bit more:

There are only two situations:

1. You're in a complete noob or unranked match. You already will get useless teammates that don't know how to play the game anyway. In fact, I'm now suspicious that everyone in this thread are this extremely bigoted player I play with sometimes in an unranked game, who gets angry at every noob when we lose with that noob on our team, or quitter, or whatever he can blame things on. Calling out dodgers is highly suspicious that you're one of those people.

2. You're in a ranked match. By definition, there are less "bad actors" here, as they would have been banned and have to work to get back to this rank. This is a straightforward problem to solve and if your company is so bad at it that every match somehow has this problem (which itself is against odds even without moderation), then they're not doing their job. Of course they could always add whatever gimmick you want to appease you instead of solving the problem (moderating better).

First of all you need to stop with the personal attacks, it weakens your argument.

Second, we’re not talking about unskilled players. We’re talking about players who intentionally seek to grief others. Players who want the game to end prematurely, or who use unfair assistive programs (cheats).

Your second point is a feature not a bug, IMO.

I want a mechanism that uniquely identifies players to prevent them from circumventing bans they’ve received for their bad behavior.

You keep turning this into a privacy problem. For you that may be the case, but for myself I want my multiplayer games to be able to uniquely identify players. You suddenly bringing to the extreme of “police state”, etc, does not help your argument.

Finally, you insist these problems are “over represented” yet don’t provide anything that addresses the problem I actually stated. Players using hacks/cheats are typically over represented, in games like Overwatch, League of Legends, DotA2, any team strategy game, there are a significant amount of selfish players who will grief there team because they did not get their way. The answer “well then play ranked”, is a non-answer because it implies that we should not be allowed to enjoy casual gameplay.

You seem quite adamant that people should be able to behave poorly, and bypass restrictions applied to them for their poor behavior. I’m curious why.

And lastly, I’ve never had to change a phone number because it was “blocked by something out of my control”. I’ve changed a users DID because they made the mistake of giving the number out to customers.

You didn't answer anything I said.

Warzone is a game that's distributed by Activision Blizzard. It uses the exact same scheme that OW2 does.

Literally every $5 account listed there will also work for OW2, and those accounts have been sold for almost 2 years now.

And forget dodging, Warzone has a massive cheating problem that verification didn't even make a ding in.

Verification will not work for OW2. Maybe you felt placebo, maybe your game was considered not worth it by bad actors... but the fact I can click on that link and buy an account for $5 that's verified with the same system that OW2 needs proof it doesn't work here.

It sounds like Blizzard/Activision is doing a poor job of ratcheting down on abused carriers.

However, at their scale they may consider this effective enough. The $5 cost on the underground market probably still represents a large enough hurdle to significantly reduce the number of casual bad actors. People who will not be investing in an updated cheat and/or account after their first ban.