Activision Hands Out a Free Month to Paying Members of Call of Duty Elite As Outage Continues

Call of Duty Elite remains basically down and out three days after the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Activision said today they will be extending all one-year paid memberships to the service by 30 days to help make up for the outage.

They are also extending the ability to sign up as a “Founder” until the end of the month.

The biggest issue that Elite initially faced was registration, Activision said. But updates yesterday greatly increased how many people could register at one time. Which led to the next problem: Too many users.

“At launch, our registration and login systems were crushed by gamers trying to enter the Elite site at the same time,” according to an update on the service. “We have now fixed the registration and login systems, but we have found that the greater than expected demand is crashing servers. We’re immediately deploying multiple additional servers to beef up the system. We are also going to temporarily limit access to Elite services on both the console applications and website while we build additional capacity and scale. We’ll look to increase access to greater numbers of users as soon as possible.”

As Activision pushes to get those extra servers up and online they say they will be limited access to the service. They don’t, however, say how they’re limiting it. It would make some sense for them to give first access to premium members, since those users are paying extra for the service, but this is a service meant to be open equally to those who aren’t paying as well, so maybe that would be a bad idea.

Activision also was quick to point out that once you do get into the service, if you’re able to, it may show stats that seem to be incorrect. Don’t worry, they say, those correct stats are still being tracked.

The stat-tracking service outage doesn’t seem to be impacting gameplay, which remains online and mostly trouble-free, from what I’ve seen.

Elite Service Notice [Elite Status Update]

You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.