Activision’s Hyped Call of Duty Elite Continues to Stumble [UPDATED]

UPDATE: Activision is now backtracking about Call of Duty Elite's on PC. Apparently the service will show up in some form eventually.

"We misspoke," said the company on Twitter, likely in response to media reports. "Our goal has always been to provide a free PC offering for ELITE. Stay tuned for an update as timing is still being determined."

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If I didn’t know any better, I’d have assumed Call of Duty Elite was the launch of a Call of Duty MMO, given how many problems the service has experienced getting off the ground.

As of today, many Call of Duty Elite features are still disabled, as Activision and its internal teams grapple with the massive amount of traffic, and have revealed PC owners may be out of luck entirely.

“We are working towards a universal Elite experience but we cannot guarantee if or when a version will be available for the PC,” said the official Twitter account last night.

Call of Duty Elite’s issues have been severe enough for Activision to give everyone a 30-day extension of the premium services, and the Twitter account is just dozens and dozens of customer service messages directed back at people having trouble getting Call of Duty Elite to work properly.

The issues facing Activision’s own expanded version of Bungie.net have been there since day one, and Activision has held back the mobile applications connected to Call of Duty Elite until everything on the web side stabilizes.

In an update last night, Activision acknowledged many of the continued stresses but didn't outline much of a timeline.

“For those of you who have logged into ELITE,” said the company, “we’ve improved the stability for both the console app and website and while neither is yet working at 100%, you should be seeing the results of that work.”

Activision is working to “increase the number of users who can access the service simultaneously,” which is a big problem.

For what it’s worth, the actual multiplayer component in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is working mostly fine.

Hello

Damn!

They know how big COD(not the fish) is so they should have been prepared. Fail.

@phrosnite: Indeed, that is a big ole fail on their part, knowing the success of the previous games.

How did they not prepare for this??? It's Call of Duty. Of course Elite would have a ton of traffic.

@XenoNick said:

How did they not prepare for this??? It's Call of Duty. Of course Elite would have a ton of traffic.

This

If they give me my money back for the game & Elite then I'll just walk away from the whole thing. I don't mind doing my bit.

@Nightriff said:

@XenoNick said:

How did they not prepare for this??? It's Call of Duty. Of course Elite would have a ton of traffic.

This

Agreed

By this point if activision wants to maintain a shred of credibility, they need to offer the Elite service for free and build a new business model for the next release, and roll it out then.. properly.

Wtf?

So many things about what I've seen make me happy I didn't buy this game

Did they think there would be only like 10.000 connections at one time? Delusional fucks.

This is why you run a proper beta test, folks. Or hire professionals who have done this sort of thing before.

Bungie.net has always worked perfectly going back to when Halo 2 launched. It worked from day 1 of Halo 2.

They even had a beta for this (which I was a part of), which I guess was worthless now. GG, Activision.

Let's all continue to throw money at Activision because they clearly have their shit together. *sigh* At this point I'm just barely hanging on to Starcraft 2. There are too many other good games out there for me to stand for garbage like this.

The answer is probably more obvious than everyone thinks: Large web teams invariably have weak links (i.e. crappy developers) and a company the size of Activision probably doesn't implement best practices in these add-on products (like unit testing, proper stress testing etc) because the budgets aren't there.

That or they might even be sub-contracting the development of the product to a third-party company.

Setting up stress testing to simulate millions of users and then properly log and analyze the performance of those tests takes skill and money.

$60 still in my pocket for a multi-player that i loved but feels old hat now. So glad I didn't buy this game.

Totally ridiculous. At this point Activision should be renamed Call of Duty Inc. and yet they still get "overwhelmed" with traffic for a service based around their only product that matters? 100% of their resources should have been put into this. They have enough cash in the bank, enough talented engineers. Someone was just cutting the corners a little too closely.

It's certainly a big misstep. But the service is working at around 85%, at least it was a s of last night. I'm guessing they gave the 30 day extension because that's how long this might take to get resolved. :(

If only there was another large division of Activision that had a huge amount of experience dealing with on line stats and leader boards. But alas how could they have known what was needed?

By this point if activision wants to maintain a shred of credibility, they need to offer the Elite service for free and build a new business model for the next release, and roll it out then.. properly.

I'm not an expert™, but stat tracking and the technical stuff around the Elite service don't seem that difficult. At this point, I'm kind of just hoping they will release the DLC free without incident since that's all I was really looking to get out of the service. Not excited for contests I'll never win, noob tube, "founder" status, etc.

@Enigma777: Well crap I forgot people are silly and willing to invest in unproven things.

I can't even create an account on that page. Anyone else have that problem? When I click "send" the screen goes white and... that's it, nothing happens.

Fanning the flames. You smell that? That's the smell of journalism.

It's disappointing that it's taking this long to set up a stats service, but most people who paid for it probably only care about the DLC anyway.

Battlelog is working great, just for the record.

What's with the campaign screenshot? I spy a Captain Price.

I didnt really care about Elite at all, but when it has worked it is actually kinda cool.

lets do a "beta" to prevent this shit from happening btw beta meaning marketing tool we dont actually test our shit harrrr.

The question now is whether or not this is annoying enough to reduce the number of buyers of the next CoD game.

I made it on for a minutes last night after trying for the last week. The free stat tracking stuff didn't seem much more in depth than what is available within MW3. The fact that Elite is launched as a separate app from MW3 kind of limits its value to me.

For some reason I though the Elite service was PC only. Reading that there is no current PC version of Elite really surprised me. 

Battlelog works perfectly, doesn't cost a thing, and offers a better experience overall. That isn't being elitist, its being objective.

$60 still in my pocket for a multi-player that i loved but feels old hat now. So glad I didn't buy this game.

You'd think with the numbers that the COD series makes annually they could at least put out a functioning service, especially considering you have to pay for it. 

Bungie.net has been doing this since Halo 2 and it was free and it never failed this hard.....

I thought people realized this when they didn't announce a harden edition for pc o_O.

Or hire professionals who have done this sort of thing before.

The game earned a staggering $400 million dollars in the first 24 hours after its release, making it the biggest opening day seller ever. The previous record holders? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which earned $310 million in its first 24 hours in 2010 and Call of Duty: Black Ops, which earned $360 million in the first 24 hours after its release.
 
Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for 'Star Wars' and 'Lord of the Rings,' two of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick in a statement.

Utter Bullshit Activision.

“We are working towards a universal Elite experience but we cannot guarantee if or when a version will be available for the PC”

I'm so relieved that I sold my shares a while ago...

Maybe I'll try logging in again. I've tried a few times at about 8am but it's never worked yet.

once again they fail to deliver

Know what's awesome? Battlelog.

@Superfriend said:

Or hire professionals who have done this sort of thing before.

Uh, can you recommend someone who has pulled off the largest game launch in history, without a hitch?
I mean, someone who doesn't already work for Activision...

The game earned a staggering $400 million dollars in the first 24 hours after its release, making it the biggest opening day seller ever. The previous record holders? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which earned $310 million in its first 24 hours in 2010 and Call of Duty: Black Ops, which earned $360 million in the first 24 hours after its release.
 
Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for 'Star Wars' and 'Lord of the Rings,' two of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick in a statement.

@MrKlorox said:

Know what's awesome? Battlelog.

BattleLog definitely turned out better than I'd expected (though it's got its kinks). I thought CoD Elite was by far the better looking of the two services design and usability-wise. I haven't seen it lately, though. Just watched the demo video that came out over the summer.

Seeing how the actual game worked perfectly fine at launch (unlike the other "big" modern military shooter this holiday) and they gave everyone a free month I fail to see why people are bitching. Oh right, it's Activision.

Even better is myself and 2 friends joining a game in progress, killing someone and getting -1999998839 EXP. I'm now level 1 and won't be digging myself out of that hole anytime soon. Called Activision after waiting on the phone for over an hour and they are supposed to take care of it at some point. Good thing we don't have dedicated servers on PC right? Safer that way...

Way to fail horribly at ripping off Halo Waypoint haha

The game itself works fine. Personally, all I want Elite for is my free 2 hours of double XP. Not losing sleep over this.

@TheKing said:

Seeing how the actual game worked perfectly fine at launch (unlike the other "big" modern military shooter this holiday) and they gave everyone a free month I fail to see why people are bitching. Oh right, it's Activision.

I don't know what game and service you were using, but Battlefield 3 worked without problems for me out of the box on launch and Battlelog was up and running perfectly the moment I signed-in the same day (and since).

As for MW3, I could barely get into parties and matchmaking was a nightmare of "Could not migrate to host" pop-ups and static screens waiting to find me a game. A complete mess of a launch.

Not just that, but having actually signed into Elite and messed around with it... there's not much to get all that excited about. Battlelog tracks an infinite amount of stats more than Elite does and navigating Elite, for the time being, is a sluggish mess of an experience. :|