According to Beachhead production VP Daniel Suarez, "It was our fault that the service wasn't up and running the day (fans) put in their token or the day they bought it. They kind of have to bear with us while we bring this all back up, but for us it's literally 'Give us those couple weeks, we're giving those to you for free and come December 1st the goal is that we'll have everything up and running.'"
Suarez also admitted that they misjudged what platform users would access Elite from, stating, "When we ran our beta, (it) was strictly on the PC and a lot of our assumptions were based around (the idea) that a larger majority of users were going to use the PC (interface) since it's a more robust version of the service than the console app. Some of that may have been incorrectly analyzed, because we're seeing 80 to 90 per cent of our users coming straight from the console app.
"So the way we've had to balance out the way that's feeding the community is different. Right now we're retrofitting that so that that works better across the board rather than the way it was set up."
As for the PC Elite delay, Suarez explained that the extra time was due to making it more secure. "On the PC, that's an open platform (which is) more prone to cheats and hacks. We're trying to prevent them as much as possible, but that platform isn't as secure," he related, adding, "As we're doing competitions and more things specific to stats and generating those stats and creating leaderboards for people, we don't want to create a situation where the service itself becomes invalidated by people having crazy stats because they've been able to do something to the game."
Activision has added an extra month to premium subscribers who'd bought into the service. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was released on the 8th November on all major platforms.