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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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