Right after the hero shooter was down for emergency maintenance
A DDoS attack on Blizzard caused issues forOverwatch 2players earlier today, following on from similar attacks on the company during the free to play shooter’s launch last week. The latest attack came just after Overwatch 2 had finished a period of emergency maintenance. Although Blizzard have confirmed the DDoS attack has now ended, the recurring attacks aren’t exactly a good sign for a game already beset by technical issues.
Some Battle.net players may have experienced “high latency and disconnections” during the attack, Blizzard Supporttweeted. The attack began shortly after a period of emergency maintenance left Overwatch 2 offline for an hour. Blizzardacknowledgedthrough their forum that they were prioritising work to fix an issue that prevents players from accessing all their owned heroes, which they put down to a server error when tracking player progression.
Along with the most recent DDoS attack, Overwatch 2 also saw two of its heroestemporarily withdrawnfrom play for bug fixes to their ability kits. Transforming robot who’s not a TransformerBastionwas withdrawn from all play modes. Techie ZZ Top impersonator Torbjörn was booted from competitive, but stayed playable in Quick Play. Both of these heroes had bugs that “heavily impacted gameplay”, Blizzard said.
Bastion’s problem was a glitch with the character’s artillery ultimate, as noted onReddit. The ability was added for Bastion’s Overwatch 2 rework, but there was an issue with the timer if PC players pressed Q and the left mouse button at the same time as Bastion’s last shell fired. This extended the timer, letting Bastion fire as many shells as possible in that time. Torbjörn’s issue wasreportedanecdotally on the CompetitiveOverwatchsubreddit as a doubling of his overload ability. This would only work once, but extended the time the ability was active for and stacked the character’s armour.
Ollie felt the game was fun but overshadowed by expectations of a true sequel in hisOverwatch 2 review-in-progress. “For a content update, Overwatch 2 does an absolutely phenomenal job,” he said. “For a sequel, it feels pretty underwhelming. I wonder, would it have been better to use chapters like Fortnite did? Something between a content update and a sequel?”
Activision Blizzard are still contending withlegal issuesandreportsalleging workplace discrimination, harassment and poor working conditions. The company’s also in the process of beingacquired by Microsoftfor $68.7 billion (£60.8 billion), a surprise deal announced back in January. That month, Blizzard Entertainment head Mike Ybarra said he wascommitted to fostering changewithin the company.
Overwatch 2 is a free to play download from Battle.net. If you’re stuck in a queue then why not check out Ollie’show to unlock every hero in Overwatch 2 guide?
