Activision Apologizes, Promises Fixes to PS3 Call of Duty 4 Online
There are some issues with Call of Duty 4’s online play on PlayStation 3. Developer Infinity Ward’s community manager, fourzerotwo, has posted a [Please register to see this link. ] from Activision’s Chief Technical Officer, Steve Pearce, which attempts to explain what has caused the problems and what’s being done to repair the situation.
In short, they didn’t have enough servers to maintain the load of players. They’ve implemented a fix, and to make some additional changes, the servers will be taken offline tomorrow, Wednesday, January 9, at 4:00 AM PST. It should only be down for a few hours at most, but that seems like a small price to pay to allow IW to ensure there won’t be any further latency problems from their end.
Check after the full message from Pearce after the break.
Firstly, on behalf of Activision and DemonWare, I’d like to apologize for the difficulties you’ve experienced while playing the PlayStation 3 version of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare during the holiday season.
The fact is that we’ve experienced an unprecedented load on the DemonWare backend servers, which has steadily increased since late December beyond our expectations.* In spite of all of our planning and precautions, the extreme load revealed several issues.* These issues triggered unscheduled downtime this past month. As we encountered issues, we deployed additional hardware and/or optimized the server infrastructure to keep the service up and running.* However, while the servers were active for the vast majority of the time, many players experienced significant wait times repeatedly when joining games.
To overcome this issue, we’ve implemented a fix today, which should dramatically improve the time it takes to join an online game.* And, in order to make additional improvements we are briefly taking the servers offline tomorrow, Wednesday January 9th at 4:00 a.m. PST
As a rule, we try to avoid scheduled downtime whenever possible.* However, at this juncture we will need 1-2 hours to update a number of server infrastructure components.* We apologize for any short-term inconvenience this may cause, and appreciate your ongoing support and patience.
Our expectation is that the server load will continue to increase as system bottlenecks are removed.* So in the coming days, we will continue to monitor our system and make further optimizations and improvements as necessary.* We will be deploying additional hardware to improve our database throughput and load handling.* In addition to the added hardware, we are further optimizing components of the underlying server software to improve performance.* We hope to be able to hot deploy these updates while the system is live.* In the event that the system requires further scheduled downtime, we will post a message both here and in-game via the “Message of the Day” to keep everyone informed.
Rest assured that we are taking every possible action to insure that your Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare online PS3 experience is smooth and trouble free.* We apologize for the trouble this has caused and ask for your understanding and cooperation as we get things sorted over the coming days.
Activision Apologizes, Promises Fixes to PS3 Call of Duty 4 Online
