You're looking at 30 million+ people who flat out cannot even play the game.
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.
Also a landline doesn't work for verification? How does that make sense?
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.