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Call of Duty Elite should be fixed by December 1
by Alice O'Connor, Nov 21, 2011 7:00pm PSTCall 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.
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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
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 : Shacknews
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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.
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