We’ve had some vigorous debate on COD over the last week, with both camps arguing for and against the franchise. Still, Modern Warfare 3 has sold tons of copies, with one particular draw for fans being the new stat-tracking service, Elite.
Except that getting into Elite is much harder than originally anticipated. There’s been so much demand for the service, that Activision just can’t cope, forcing gamers to have to wait to gain access onto the crowded servers. Activision has been hard at work naturally, providing the following statements regarding their short-sightedness while they fix the congestion issues for Elite.
“We knew MW3 was going to be big and we planned for a big demand, it’s just the infrastructure is struggling to keep up with volume”, COD VP of production Daniel Suarez told Joystiq. “We did a beta, the beta was intended to give us the data on how everything would behave with people hitting different parts of the service and different parts of the site”.
“But when you add the complexities of it being not only an online service but one that has a console component, a PC component, and a soon-to-be-released mobile component, all being released at the same time, it’s never been done before at this scale”.
Even though the publisher had tested out the market earlier with a beta version of Elite, it seems that they were still unprepared for the sudden surge of interest once the genuine service was launched, with the blame being attributed towards the popularity of the franchise.
“From the planning standpoint, we planned for it to be big”, Suarez said. “It’s Call of Duty, we have all our metrics. We know what our metrics are from Black Ops and MW2 and all the previous Call of Duties, so we were planning for it to be big”.
“But we just literally had so much influx right now from all the different areas, from the console and the web. It just hit us a lot harder than we thought”. As for those gamers who are waiting patiently for their turn to use the service, we hope you’re patient, as there is no concrete deadline for normal services to resume any time soon.
“We want to make sure the things we’re doing right now remain stable,” said Suarez. “Right now we don’t have a definitive goal to have everything up by this date, we just don’t have that data yet”.
Last Updated: November 14, 2011
