IAMfourzerotwo

Hey Everyone –

As promised yesterday, we wanted to give you a full update on the status of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare multiplayer servers for the PS3 and let you know exactly what’s been happening, why it’s been happening and what’s being done on the server-side to address it. To do this; Steve Pearce, Chief Technology Officer of Activision Inc., gives us a break-down of the situation and the upcoming server maintenance to address it.

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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

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As he stated, the servers will be down for maintenance as of 4 AM (PST) Wednesday morning for a few hours as they roll out this fix. You will notice the PS3 MOTD has changed to reflect this and will be updated once again with any updated information after the server update.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and I look forward to seeing all of you online.