We don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but we can confirm that servers for game of the moment Call of Duty Black Ops are offline at the moment. However, the strange thing is that it’s only affecting PS3, PC and Wii gamers, as Xbox 360 owners are totally fine apparently.
Treyarch has confirmed the downtime via community manager Josh Olin and his Twitter account, revealing that the outage is due to a ‘datacenter maintenance’ window.
However, it’s a bit strange to find out that Xbox 360 owners are apparently invincible to this maintenance window, while PS3 and PC gamers in the US and Europe find out that they can no longer access the multiplayer servers, with no indication as of yet to when the servers will be back up.
”Some PS3, PC, and Wii players may experience temporary difficulties connecting right now during a datacenter maintenance window.”
We don’t want to point any fingers here, but Treyarch are not exactly in PS3 and PC owner’s good books right now, especially since they continue to favor the Xbox 360 version of the game by churning out DLC every month for Microsoft’s console before PS3 and PC owners can get a sniff a month later.
It seems far more logical for Treyarch to have picked a less ‘peak’ time to shut off PS3 and PC servers to do this scheduled maintenance, rather than risk the wrath of gamers with no apparent warning. It will be interesting to see what the maintenance does exactly, and what Treyarch’s reason is for excluding Xbox 360 gamers from it.
From what we gather, the Black Ops servers have been down on PS3, PC and Wii for more than three hours now, and although you may be thinking ‘what’s the big deal, do something else’, some are obviously dealing with the downtime in their own way. You can have a read of what some gamers think of Treyarch’s Black Ops downtime here via Twitter. As you may have guessed, a lot of it isn’t pretty.
Hopefully it won’t be too long until Treyarch resume service as normal, but if you combine the fact that PS3 gamers have only just received the Escalation map pack and now gamers are unable to play it, you have to say that Treyarch has done themselves no favors here. Midnight maintenance would have been far more convenient, but someone with better knowledge obviously doesn’t share our views.