Fans of the 2016 breakout game, Overwatch, were less than pleased with the drop of Overwatch 2. On October 4, the new version was released, as a free-to-play replacement for Overwatch 1 instead of a sequel. This choice was made because Overwatch 1’s servers went down the day before, leaving many people stuck in queues, waiting to play the game for hours. These players were behind tens of thousands of other players trying to log into the game. The cause for the launch to go so poorly was a distributed denial of service attack, better known as a DDoS attack, which works by sending many requests to an online resource eventually overloading the service and forcing it to go offline. However, Overwatch 2’s servers were hit by two separate attacks, which caused many players unable to log in on the first day.

Players who were able to log on however had to merge their platform account (i.e Xbox profile, PlayStation profile) with a Battle.net account in order to have access to their character skins or certain weapon skins they unlocked in the first game. Despite doing this, however, many noticed issues about not seeing all their cosmetics and currencies after they did merge accounts, as well as being able to watch their previous matches. Activision Blizzard, the company behind the development of both Overwatch games addressed the issues, saying that the servers were being worked on and there would be improvements; however, players should still expect a wait. To compensate for the lousy launch of the game, Blizzard is giving away a free skin for one of the heroes “Reaper”, and a weapon charm to anyone who logs into the game between October 25 and the end of the game’s first season, which has no definite date as of right now.

As of October 26, 2022, the servers have been fixed, with returning Overwatch 1 veterans able to reobtain their cosmetics, and new players able to log in for the first time, and have fun.