We are days aways on the next step of the Overwatch world with Overwatch 2 launch as the PvP game by Blizzard Entertainment will go live by October 4. But before, let’s read a reviewed version about how Blizzard will deal with cheaters.

Blizzard Entertainment announced this week that Overwatch 2 will have a new anti-cheat, community protection, and moderation tool called the Defense Matrix, based symbolically in the D.Va ability that allows her to absorb and negate incoming attacks. 

Basically, Defense Matrix is a collection of several new account security and moderation tools, the biggest two of which are SMS Protect and voice chat transcriptions.

SMS Protect will NOT be optional and all players are required to register their real mobile phone number and the first layer of security is that a number CANNOT share multiple accounts and while Blizzard acknowledge that some people will try to use specialized phones like VoIP and those devices will not be allowed.

About the voice chat transcription, Blizzard acknowledge that while some may feel uncomfortable that voice chat conversation will be temporarily stored, it will be ONLY used when a player wants to report another player being a bad actor and Blizzard urged honest players to REPORT as fast as an incident happens to assure high chances on getting a positive flag and helping purge bad actors.

With this, the General Chat practically is being removed for that very reason, it was the source of cheaters and toxic gamers to go blatantly without much control and that is something that Blizzard wanted to check before launching Overwatch 2.

Finally, Overwatch 2 is adding a new onboarding experience for brand-new players, designed to get them up to speed before they’re allowed to join the nearest Deathmatch. Dubbed FTUE, or First Time User Experience, new players with new battle.net accounts made on or after October 4th will be shunted into a system whereby they unlock heroes and gameplay modes. 

Via Blizzard