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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> Likewise, (some) prepaid phones won’t work, and neither will VoIP numbers (which use IP networks to make calls or send texts). Likewise, a landline phone number won’t work either.

This affects me. If only I could give them a phone number.

I've had a Cricket family plan for 5+ years and their official support recommendation is to "change number or carrier". They offer no other authentication options - not even a credit card.

Am I going to pay an extra $50 a month to play your "free" game? No thank you. There are some people who prepaid for their early access content and are now fighting to get their money back on a game they can't even play. What a stupidly anti-customer company.

All this for a game that is a glorified patch of the previous one.

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Unfortunately I don’t think the economics are in your favor as I assume you are within a small enough segment to make this worth it.

Cricket alone has 12 million subscribers in the US. Metro PCS has ~18 million. Boost Mobile has 8 million.

You're looking at 30 million+ people who flat out cannot even play the game.

Yes, but this was something obvious from the outset from an engineering standpoint. I would never consider requiring phone verification for my games. I don't even require an email account as lots of games do (because of cargo cult) these days.

The Western software development bubble (largely the demographic of HN) is full of self centered people / ignorant people who have never seen hardware aside from a Mac or a $2K Windows box, who buy a new phone literally every year, who claim to be saving the world. On the contrary what you get is web browsers being too slow to run on hardware of someone who lives outside the West and being banned from the game because outside the West you can't conform to the game's asinine requirements. The irony on top of the irony is that the ones who think of themselves affluent for this are not at all: cell phones and their protocols are badly engineered technology.

Wow, this is kind of going all-in on phone verification, with what I would argue is a potentially classist end result.

Also a landline doesn't work for verification? How does that make sense?

Well this sucks. It doesn't work on individual plans for cricket either. I paid for the Overwatch 2: Watchpoint Pack (mostly due to their confusing marketing around it). I've been playing Overwatch almost since the day it came out, and I was excited about it since it was announced in 2014. I was really looking forward to playing OW2....but maybe this is a good thing for me. This game encapsulated 6 years worth of my life. Lots of highs and lows. Maybe I need to move on.

Fight them for the refund (or even do a chargeback on your credit card), otherwise they might not understand what a dumb idea it is.

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