Call of Duty Elite should be fixed by December 1

Call of Duty Elite was swamped when it launched alongside Modern Warfare 3 this month, leaving most players unable to access the social service. It's still spotty, but Activision has now said that it intends to have everything up and running by December 1

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Call of Duty Elite was swamped when it launched alongside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 this month, leaving most players unable to access the social service. It's still spotty, but publisher Activision has now said that it intends to have everything up and running by December 1.

"It was our fault that the service wasn't up and running the day [fans] put in their token or the day they bought it," Activision VP of production Daniel Suarez told G4TV.

Those who subscribed to the optional premium Elite service were offered a month of free service to cover the outage. Call of Duty: Elite developer Beachhead plans to "to have everything up and running by or before the 30-day mark," Suarez explained, before subscribers' freebie periods runs out.

"They kind of have to bear with us while we bring this all back up, but for us it's literally 'Give us those couple weeks, we're giving those to you for free and come December 1 the goal is that we'll have everything up and running.'"

Elite services have been coming online one by one, and this gradual approach will continue. This week will bring the launch of new competitions and subscriber-only "TV series" Friday Night Fights, and the mobile Elite should launch "at the end of November."

There's still no word on when Elite will come to PC. An official representative slipped up last week and said they couldn't "cannot guarantee if or when" it would hit PC, but it is still coming. The problem, Suarez says, is that the PC "isn't as secure" a platform as consoles, so there's greater risk of hacking.

"As we're doing competitions and more things specific to stats and generating those stats and creating leaderboards for people, we don't want to create a situation where the service itself becomes invalidated by people having crazy stats because they've been able to do something to the game."

Beachhead is working with MW3 developers Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games on possible solutions, Suarez said, but none has been finalized yet.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    November 21, 2011 11:00 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Call of Duty Elite should be fixed by December 1.

    Call of Duty Elite was swamped when it launched alongside Modern Warfare 3 this month, leaving most players unable to access the social service. It's still spotty, but Activision has now said that it intends to have everything up and running by December 1

    • reply
      November 21, 2011 2:16 PM

      proving once again.... Activision not only rushed this game... but was NOT prepared to roll out a service they wanted to charge for just to try and compete with BF3... thats too bad...

      lets just hope that the next COD is actually a fresh new idea and not a re-skinned clone of a previous version with a few new tweaks

      • reply
        November 21, 2011 3:28 PM

        There's zero chance of the next Call of Duty being a "fresh new idea"; the 2-year leapfrog cycle is too lucrative and too successful, and Activision have successfully gamed the system with it. All we're getting in return is the same hollow Baysplosion-fest single-player and carbon-copy multiplayer with slight adjustments every year. It's so successful, even competitors are copying them (Medal of Honor, Homefront). It's a cancer on the FPS genre, in terms of creativity.

        Also, is a game considered "rushed" when it's announced to release on date X, and hits that date? To the publishers, no, it's not rushed, since they went to platform cert 6 weeks before the release date (September 27, 2011 for MW3). As for the service offering, it's hard to simulate millions of real-world users against a service application unless you build the test environment to approximate that kind of environment. I doubt that Beachhead and Activision thought that far ahead.

    • reply
      November 21, 2011 3:45 PM

      I tried it last night and even though it was around midnight CST, it took forever to log in and pull up game stats. It really makes you wonder what kind of hardware they launched it on.

    • reply
      November 21, 2011 6:38 PM

      So subscribers get a free month of shitty service and might, MIGHT have service restored by the time the freebie is over? Nice. A class action law suit would do a lot to discourage publishers from shoving out games that clearly aren't ready.

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