The first batch of Call of Duty: ELITE maps rolled out for Modern Warfare 3 players earlier in the week. Surprisingly, they are restricted to just one Gamertag, meaning that only the premium ELITE subscriber who downloaded the maps can use them online. Other gamers playing on the same console are out of luck.
Unusually enough, this contradicts the terms of the download, which clearly state that the content will be available to all users of the first console the content is downloaded to.
Shortly after Liberation and Piazza were released, users took to the Call of Duty Forums to report the problem. The short side of it is this: Only the Gamertag associated with the Call of Duty: ELITE content is able to use it. Friends who come over to try out the maps online will not get a chance to use them on their own Gamertags. As a consolation prize, the maps that are locked to the ELITE account can be played in an offline split-screen game, so long as the owner of the content is the head of the party.
Should the remainder of the Call of Duty: ELITE content possess the same issue, there might be more than an uproar within the CoD community. Confounding matters, Activision allegedly doesn’t know whether or not this problem will go away when the maps become available to all Modern Warfare 3 players in March’s Content Collection.
This sounds like a potentially damning move on Activision’s part, resulting in families needing to pay for separate premium ELITE memberships for each Modern Warfare 3 player in a household. Though this may be an inadvertent act on Activision’s part, it doesn’t make the issue go away.
Now that this issue has come to light, did Activision just end up wasting money with its latest advertising campaign attempting to sway users to join Call of Duty: ELITE? What do you think of this boondoggle?
Modern Warfare 3 is available now for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.
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Source: Joystiq, Eurogamer
