Overwatch 2 developer Blizzard has updated their community on many of the launch issues plaguing the game at launch, confirming that the locked characters and missing cosmetics problem isn’t a permanent loss of content for players.
The launch of Overwatch 2 has faced some major criticism from the community following many players reporting that they have lost parts – and in some cases all – of their old OW1 cosmetics, skins, and in-game currency.
These issues are being reported to the Overwatch forums as well as on platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. Things like weapon skins, character unlocks, and more have all been reported by players as being lost, with no way at the moment to recover any of the data and progress that has been lost.
We want to provide an update on what we have been doing behind the scenes to get more players into #Overwatch2 and make your play experience smoother.Read more here https://t.co/YmTcxm3Zh0
— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) October 6, 2022
Following this, the Overwatch 2 dev team posted a launch status update on October 5, 2022.
The post began with Blizzard apologizing for the shaky launch of the game. “First, we want to apologize to our players. We expected the launch of Overwatch 2 to go smoothly. We hold ourselves to a higher standard and we are working hard to resolve the issues you are experiencing.”
They then went on to break down the major issues and complaints from the launch, offering up reasons as to why these are occurring and what solutions there are and are being worked on to combat the problems.
Missing player items & locked characters linked to account merge problems
For those who have reported loss of data and items when booting up Overwatch 2, Blizzard has explained that this could be due to failure to completely merge their accounts correctly.
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“This is understandable—one cause for this is due to a bug with the launch build not providing an account merge prompt on some consoles. We rolled out a partial UI fix earlier today to help some console players progress through the account merge flow, however, we are still working on fixes for additional UI issues.
However, Blizzard then added that for the “other half” of players having these problems, the reasoning is simply that “things are just taking longer than expected for items from the original Overwatch to transfer and populate in Overwatch 2.”
Fret not though, as the devs reiterated that, “in all cases, no player data has been wiped or lost.”
For those who have reported that they have been locked out of using certain characters, Blizzard explained how “these cases are almost certainly related to our new First Time User Experience (FTUE) flow incorrectly being applied to existing players.”
They then added that they “have seen relogging into the game resolve this issue in most cases” but if this still doesn’t fix the issue they encourage players to open up a support ticket when experiencing any of these Overwatch 2 launch issues.