What’s wrong with the Overwatch 2 servers? Skip Queue Time

Gamers worldwide are stuck in absurdly long matchmaking queues of Overwatch 2 and facing terrible server issues. As soon as players try to join the lobby, they are slapped with a terrifying text that reads something similar to “In Queue: 2000 players ahead of you.” These numbers may change a bit but the annoying error stays the same in most cases.

Unfortunately, no matter how long they wait, the number of players queuing up does not seem to decrease. Commonly, there are a few methods to solve certain user-end server-related issues, but this is a major server fault at the end of Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the development of the Overwatch series, which recently faced a malicious cyber attack.

Overwatch 2 servers were subjected to two (2) DDoS attacks which created widespread server errors and artificially extended wait times, as confirmed in a tweet by Aaron Keller, the game director of Overwatch 2.

We’re steadily making progress on server issues and stability, as well as working through a second DDoS attack. We’re all hands on deck and will continue to work throughout the night. Thank you for your patience – we’ll share more info as it becomes available.
— Aaron Keller (@aaronkellerOW) October 5, 2022

According to Cloudflare, “a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.”

Thus, this issue will persist unless the devs eliminate the effects of this cyber attack on the game’s server, and sadly the players cannot do anything to avoid it. Still, there are some methods to fix similar client-side server errors. Here is one trick to do the same.

Change the Overwatch 2 Server Region

PC gamers can voluntarily change the server region sometimes to connect to a less crowded and more stable server in order to skip or reduce the long queue time and play the game almost instantly.

How to change Overwatch 2 server region?

To change the Overwatch 2 server region:

Open up the Battle.net client.
Click on the globe icon next to Overwatch 2 (Game version) at the bottom of the screen.
Here, switch the server to a different continent (Europe or Asia). Note that this may affect your latency. You may experience high ping.
Once you have changed your server region, click on Play.

Now, when the game launches, you should get a much lower queue wait time depending on the player crowd of that region.

About Overwatch 2

Overwatch 2 is an upcoming first-person shooter developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment. The sequel to the 2016 hero shooter Overwatch, the game is intended to have a shared environment for player-versus-player (PvP) modes with the first game while introducing persistent cooperative modes. A major change in PvP was to reduce team sizes from six to five, which required several characters to be reworked.

Overwatch 2 is set to launch as free-to-play on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in early access on October 4, 2022. It will feature full cross-platform play.