PlayStation 3 users have been suffering with terrible online play from Call of Duty 4 since release. This problem seems to be coming to an end as the guys at Infinity Ward have finally gotten on the issue at hand. According to them, they will have this problem fixed today or within the upcoming couple of days. This is a letter directly from the team over at Infinity Ward.
“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.
Thanks,
Steve Pearce
CTO, Activision”
We’re glad to see Infinity Ward step up and take responsibility for the issue at hand and take the appropriate steps to move forward. As you can see from this information, things only look to get better from here. So far all of you out there getting angry or upset, don’t break your controller just yet.