Call of Duty Elite still down as high load sees servers struggle

UPDATE

Another tweet from Elite's official Twitter account has cast doubt on whether the service will ever see light of day on PC at all.

"We are working towards a universal Elite experience but we cannot guarantee if or when a version will be available for the PC," read the announcement, in answer to another user's question.

Activision are still unavailable for comment on the matter.

Original Story

Call of Duty Elite, the much vaunted social and stat tracking service which accompanied the launch of Modern Warfare 3, is still experiencing problems, preventing players from logging in.

The service has been down almost since launch, with various official Activision channels citing over subscription to the servers as the key problem. At the time of writing, the service is listed as 'intermittent'.

Beachhead, the new studio which launched earlier this year with Elite as its main remit, is said to be working "around the clock" in order to address the problem.

Judging from posts in various forums, both official and non, that work seems to be affecting the multiplayer game servers, with users complaining of lag issues and a failure to connect, resulting in a message stating that "the server has rejected our request."

Menu graphics and inputs were also reported as lagging noticeably.

"Founder" members of the Elite service, early adopters who have paid for premium facilities, have been emailed to say that membership has been extended by 30 days for free and that access to the Elite service will be prioritised for them once the service is back up and running.

"We will also be prioritising your access to Elite in order to ensure that you are among the first to get fully into the service," said the mail from Beachhead's Chacko Sonny and Activision VP of digital Jamie Berger.

Customers have also been assured that the back end functionality of the service, which collects data from online matches to help players improve their skill, is operating correctly - all data is being captured and will be available once Elite is online.

Last week, Activision's Daniel Suarez, the VP of publishing for Call of Duty, conducted a lengthy interview with Joystiq, explaining the delay and promising a fix soon.

"The launch of MW3 had been huge and we knew it would be huge," he said. "It just translated into a tremendous amount of traffic to Elite. And we anticipated it to be big, it just turned out to be even bigger than that.

"The high demand from the console application and registration on the website from the PC really crippled the registration and login process which then translated into the backend servers being slammed," Suarez added.

"So we've been working around the clock to alleviate access into the system and we've had a large number of people now able to register. We've resolved that piece of it and now we're actually working on getting the service back up and running to a point where people can then enjoy it."

The publisher has also delayed the release of the mobile Elite app, again citing problems with servers.

"Since we do not want to add even more stress to the back-end servers, we are holding back on launching the Elite mobile applications until the service is stable and our players can easily access it."

Activision has been contacted for comment on both the timescale for the fix - and the current problems being experienced with lag and logging in to multiplayer gaming.