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Activision: Call of Duty Elite Fix Coming "In The Next Two Weeks"

Activision's first attempt at creating a massive social network for its Call of Duty players has been a rough one. Last week during the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, users were unable to register and log into with the service. To this day users have been unable to access the service. Game Informer recently spoke to Daniel Suarez's, VP of Production at Activision, for the latest.

Launch Troubles

“We had a football game going on and we had trouble getting people into the parking lot,” Suarez said of the situation. Activision says the registration problem should be cleared up by now and its experiencing 10s of thousands of registrations per hour. But now that users can register, Activision said it’s experiencing an overload of activity and has spent the last week pushing hard on ironing out those problems to keep pace with the growth.

The publisher said last week it was seeing less than 10 percent of its Elite users getting into the service and now sees about 50 percent. “It’s greatly improved,” Suarez added. “We’re not out of the woods yet, but we are making progress. If you’re using the service hopefully that’s noticeable.”

Additionally, Activision says it’s prioritizing premium subscription members, either by purchasing the Hardened Edition of Modern Warfare 3 or through PSN and Xbox Live. Those members should be able to access the service or the free ones.

As for Elite’s functionality, the publisher says its mostly stable, and is testing when features are brought back online to see if they break. “We’re letting any free member in, either on console or web, and right now we’re throttling the amount of people we get in to stress test different features as they’re coming back online,” he said.

Backend troubles

Elite is powered through one massive back end infrastructure, meaning the web and console applications don’t work independently from one another. Activision hopes the work they’ve put in over the past week scales better with the traffic jump they're seeing and will be more efficient in the long run.

Just how many people are hitting the service? Activision wouldn't give hard numbers just yet, but for reference it said it put up the clan functionality yesterday and in 12 hours they saw 22 thousand clans generated.

Looking Forward

So when will Call of Duty Elite be up and running? "Our goal is to have [Elite] up and running at 99 percent, in terms of features and stability, in the next two weeks," Suarez said.

Other features coming in the next week include competitions and Elite TV, which will air on November 25. The mobile application for Elite is expected to launch at the end of the month.

PC Version

Activision says right now the PC platform is open for cheating and stats modification. Suarez  says the team is being careful to not create a stats site that is illegitimate. "We're working on delivering a version for PC in tandem with the guys at Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer for something for Modern Warfare 3. We haven't committed to what that is or the timing on that, but that is something we're going to be doing."

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Comments
  • I like Elite, hopefully it can blossom into what they hope will be the next standard in CoD to set it above the rest of the FPS world. On the other hand I can't help but feel that this was an easy way to get people comfortable with the idea of paying subscription fees for CoD. Thoughts?
  • I like cod elite, its fun to see some stats that I can try to improve or look at my stats. Plus 10$ off dlc, which also means I don't have to go to gamestop for ms points every time a map pack comes out. P.S What level are you guys. I'm only level 60, but with thanksgiving break I plan to prestige.
  • poor sad activision.

  • This is why i never bought into this. This elite thing is too gimmicky.
  • I love how they make it sound like cheating is only ruining the PC version. I guess they cant admit that there are aimboters on console, if they did people would want them to do something about it.
  • So much for the extra 30 days Activision is offering users, if after this 2 week wait, we can only use 15 of those days. What a load of horse crap... with hay in it... and oats.
  • I got signed up for mine pretty quickly, but I haven't really tried it past that. Hopefully everything will get resolved though.

  • I hope they get it fixed, but the multiplayer is still really fun.

  • I tried signing up for the service and found it pretty difficult. Once all was set and done the service was still pretty unstable. Sometimes I would be able to click on a few links here and there to check out some stats but eventually my browser would give me some kind of error message.
  • Well, it's working for me! With the exception of a few bugs here and there, but I get in fine. And it's awesome!
  • lol COD makes me laugh

  • So Elite will start to work efficiently when events and competitions come up?  Makes sense.  That's what I bought it for.

  • how do you join a friends clan? thats really the only problem im having.................... any answers???
  • http://pnoy.me/aI

    ghjghjh

  • And what about us people under the age of 18 that got jumped by an age requirement? Which, by the way, is higher than the game's rating!
  • Elite is pretty cool, I really like the idea

  • How hard would it be to set up the site to set off a red flag in the PC version when someone gets there stats to a 30:1 kdr ?
  • Wow, Activison is just $hi77ing on PC it's community. There should be a law that prevents such behavior.
  • Good thing they had a beta! I had pretty low expectations for this service from the start so it doesnt really surprise me.

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