Call of Duty Elite

But starting this fall, series publisher Activision will offer a service you can pay for each month: the premium grade version of something called Call of Duty Elite

Starting as a beta this summer and then launching on November 8, 2011the same day as the next Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3Call of Duty Elite will be a PC and mobile service that lets players track their stats, compete for real and virtual prizes, and form both social and gaming groups with players from across multiple CoD games.

Call of Duty Elite can be accessed both in-game and online

Call of Duty Elite can be accessed both in-game and online on a separate site, as well as on mobile apps, and it's best summarised as an enormous, nicely presented collection of data. Your own summary page has a wealth of information about your recent play you total XP, recent matches with detailed breakdowns, a heat map of your latest match showing where your kills and deaths occurred, your overall kill to death ratio, even an XP calculator that figures out how long it will take you to get to the next rank based on your current play performance.

It also offers social networking, letting you form groups with other players based on anything from a postcode to an interest to a food allergy. The idea is that it makes it easier to socialise, and easier to find others in CODBlops' 30-million strong player base who share your interests and your attitudes. The Theatre gameplay video cinema is present and correct, too. You can also track other players, comparing every imaginable facet of your gameplay performance.

As for the competitions, there'll be everything from straightforward "who can kill the most dudes this week" face-offs to screenshot competitions. A tab labelled Improve houses detailed maps of every arena, with weapon locations and choke points marked, and videos on how to best use each weapon, perk or killstreak bonus.

Call of Duty Elite: Social interaction

With all this social interaction, the obvious question is how on earth Infinity Ward expects to moderate it as anyone who's ever played online for more than about 30 seconds can tell you, Call of Duty Elite players aren't always the kind of polite, interesting people you'd like to form a social network around.

"From the service side, the good news is that we have these partners down the road called Blizzard, who have been tremendous in sharing thoughts on how they deal with this very issue.," says Activision's Jamie Berger. "You can't just build a platform, turn it on and hope it goes well. There have to be real human beings managing it, and that has to scale with the community.

"The premium membership helps here. There's no restriction on groups, everybody can join them, but at a premium level I think people expect a different level of behaviour. At a country club, you pay your money and you expect everyone to behave to a certain norm. We're going to treat it that way. When you're signing on, you're signing on to expectations of behaviour that we're going to take very seriously. We don't want to be nannies, but if people are making the experience bad for others then they shouldn't be part of it."

At the moment Call of Duty Elite only applies to Black Ops, but neither Infinity Ward nor Activision has ruled out incorporating Modern Warfare 2 at a later date, assuming the can overcome the technical difficulties inherent in backwards-engineering a service onto a game that wasn't build around it.

Sonny seems optimistic that Elite will change the way that people form player communities in Call of Duty Elite , hoping for a 100% subscription rate to the free features. "The Call of Duty Elite consumer is a tremendously diverse userbase," he says. "Far and away the single biggest thing that makes people want to play this game is being able to play with their friends, and Elite enables people to find that group of people who are suitable for them to play with, whether that's based on a zip code of an affinity or leaderboards or just who are interesting folk. It enables that connection in a way that we simply have not been able to do up until this point."

Analysts and gamers have taken to speculation about the subscription based model for the content, and many believe that the game will feature a more dynamic in-game wagering system than the one that was introduced in Black Ops, competitive leagues and tournaments for the game, community development, exclusive content (which could be maps, weapons, killstreaks, etc.), free map pack updates, and other customization tools for the hardcore Call of Duty fan.

For More information about Call of Duty Elite please visit http://www.abconlinenews.com

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