Beginning this fall, series creator Activision will provide a service you are able to pay for monthly: the premium quality edition of a little something referred to as Call of Duty: Elite. You’ll also have a free version on its way. Please do not confuse this service with the regular multiplayer. Activision insists that the multiplayer will remain free the only charge that will remain is for the map packs.

As outlined by Activision, more than 30 million persons have enjoyed Call of Duty online. Of these, 20 million do this at least once per month. The genuine committed ones who maintain the daily playing schedule amount to a remarkable 7 million. All that time added up develops out to 170 hours per gamer.

“The average Call of Duty player spends 58 minutes per day playing multiplayer. That is more than the average Facebook user spends per day on Facebook. And yet, right now, there are very few tools to unite and super charge that social community,” said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing.

What is Elite?

Beginning as a beta this summer after which launching on November 8, 2011-the same day as the next Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty: Elite will be a PC and mobile service that enables gamers to track their stats, compete and virtual prizes, and form both social and gaming groups with players from over multiple Call of duty games.

Elite is going to be accessible in two tiers of service, 1 for paying 1 for non paying Call of Duty multiplayer buffs. Even though all the perks of membership are not yet been announced, that paying group may never need to purchase a Call of Duty map pack separately again.

The Elite service is, at its most basic, an extremely extravagant website. It will mainly be accessed through users’ web browsers; however app for iOS and Android devices is also in the works.

Elite will include extensive stats, lots of social-networking features and competitions. It’s not yet known which Elite elements will be exclusive to the paid version, much less what a premium membership will cost. The paid edition is at least confirmed to contain more than just accessibility to Elite. During an introduction of the service, Jamie Berger, vice president of digital business at Activision, explained to correspondents that a premium Elite membership will give customers a continuous flow of Call of Duty material, which includes map packs. 

What does Elite consist of?

Elite is broken down into 4 sections, the first of which is Career. It collects all the player’s multiplayer stats from a PC or console and presenting them on multiple WebPages of the Elite site.

Career section

The Career webpage and pretty much all of Elite will be platform specific, so a gamer that has Call of Duty games on, say PC and Ps3 will exclusively have their statistics from one platform in their Elite interface. One surprise function on the Career page is the level calculator. It will enable gamers to enter the number of hours of Call of duty they play every day in order to have the calculator inform them just how many days it will take them to Prestige. The Career tab consists of a Leaderboard Tracker, which will allow an Elite user to compare their ranking in a wide variety of Call of Duty modes to those of other players they have befriended or are monitoring via the service.

Connect section

The Connect part of Elite makes Call of duty simply just a little bit more like Facebook. Players can make friends with each other and see how they add up on leaderboards. They can send communications to people they befriend and monitor the overall performance of players they’re not buddies with. Elite end users can also join up to 64 groups, every single defined by a hashtag.  Gamers will also be capable to communicate with each other via the Theater, which will permit users to host videos of their preferred Call of duty moments and comment on them.

One of Elite’s more brilliant features is its capability to read the meta data of the Cod videos uploaded to it and immediately tag each video with the names of the gamers in the captured match. Each and every player will easily know which videos they were in, deliberately or otherwise.

Compete section

The most encouraging and probably impactful part of Elite is the Compete section. Certain challenges will require uploading videos or screenshots that meet particular contest requirements. The main Events will pit gamers versus each other in week’s long tournaments that are set up for Call of duty players at various degrees of skill. It is not well-defined yet if the tournaments will only include comparisons of players’ statistics against one another throughout the tournament or if gamers may actually be required to actually perform specific Call of duty games versus one another.

Improve section

The least fancy portion of Elite is the Improve section that is developed to function as a training manual for Call of Duty multiplayer. It is a more attractive version of Frequently Asked Questions, offering data about how weaponry and attachments work.

There will be a public beta available for Call of Duty: Black Ops players this summer, with the final service to hit its full stride with the launch of Modern Warfare 3 on November 8, 2011. Those interested in joining should register at Call of Duty Elite Beta.