With Call of Duty Elite still struggling to serve its much-touted blend of stats and features to the throng of Modern Warfare 3 consumers, we asked Call of Duty VP of Production Daniel Suarez to explain the outage, what Activision and Beachhead Studios are doing to fix it, and when we might finally be able to see what Elite is all about. After months of hype, confusion, controversy, and promises, the ambitious web service has failed to launch and, in so doing, has failed to silence the skeptics.

It didn't take long to realize Elite wouldn't hold up to the traffic. Beachhead Studios chief Chacko Sonny posted a notice on the Call of Duty Elite status page in the early morning hours of launch day, but the game had been in consumers' hands for some time. "It's a worlwide launch for MW3 and Elite, so we had a launch occuring Monday late afternoon with Australia and then everything kicking in into Europe and then into the East Coast in the US and then the West Coast," Suarez recounted. "So the launch of MW3 had been huge and we knew it would be huge, it just translated into a tremendous amount of traffic to Elite. And we anticipated it to be big, it just turned out to be even bigger than that."

The problems began at the earliest stage of the process: registration. "The high demand from the console application and registration on the website from the PC really crippled the registration and login process which then translated into the backend servers being slammed," Suarez explained. "So we've been working around the clock to alleviate access into the system and we've had a large number of people now able to register. We've resolved that piece of it and now we're actually working on getting the service back up and running to a point where poeple can then enjoy it."