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Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

Notably, all of Valve's competitive games—Dota 2, CS:GO, and Team Fortress 2—already require this. I'm not sure I support it, but even minor barriers help fight cheaters and smurfs.

Edit: Apparently they're not actually as strict as I remember, but all three definitely have some sort of a system.

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I'm not sure where your getting this from, a phone number is _optional_ for CSGO, adding one is said to improve your "trust factor"[0], theoretically improving your matchmaking experience.

I don't believe TF2 has any sort of phone number system that I'm aware of. If there is one, it doesn't seem to function very well given the bot invasion over the last few years.

I can't speak to dota 2 as I've never played it.

[0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/00EF-D679-C76A-C1...

One way of doing all this stuff is creating "haves" and "have nots" where those who have a higher credit score from age of account, phone number, etc, get better matchmaking (against players of a similar high score) than those who forgo those things.

CSGO used to require a phone number. It changed a bit to be "optional", but all that really means now is that they made the system more opaque.

It used to be that to get prime queue (or whatever it was called) you need to phone number, since the open queue was filled with hackers. The new systems still attempts to do the same, just without the hard boundary. You may end up in the hacker lobby, or you may not. You won't know.

> I don't believe TF2 has any sort of phone number system that I'm aware of. If there is one, it doesn't seem to function very well given the bot invasion over the last few years.

If I remember correctly, in TF2 competitive mode and Mann vs Machine (pve) gets locked if you don't have steam guard enabled. But you still have access to casual and community servers, which are what you will usually want to play.

I'm going off of memory mostly. I'm pretty sure all three asked me for a phone number to play ranked, but apparently it's optional at least for CS:GO. The impression I was given though was "give your phone number or you'll only ever play with hackers and smurfs" such that it was basically required.

I figure you don’t regularly play CSGO then ;)

I don't, haha. My recollection is that it was required for ranked to avoid being put in some "cheater lobby" or something, but it's been a few years.

COD Warzone required phone verification to install when I tried. There was no way to play at all without getting a code sent to your phone. But yeah this is old news. This cancer started around 2010 when Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and friends out of nowhere required it on all of their services.

They do not require a phone number just to play the game, as Blizzard is doing here. They also accept more types of phone numbers and other authentication methods.

Doesn't feel like it reduces the number of smurfs, boosters, or account buyers in dota2. I imagine it would be even worse without, though.

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