Last month we reported that we were aware of an issue affecting some Hornet users who are Playstation 3 owners . These residents are experiencing problems trying to play Call of Duty 4 on their consoles (previous article). After discussion with Sony and Activision, Hornet Management have sought help from the producers of the game, Infinity Ward.

To date there has been no official response to this issue, but if you are a Hornet user affected by this bug, we would encourage you to post a response on the IW forums and let your feelings be known. Hornet Management originally logged an Issue on these forums back in March 2008, but never had a reply from the game developers. Since then the forums have been closed and relaunched and the original thread lost. A summary of what we have said can be found below:

In response from complaints by users trying to play Call of Duty on their PS3’s, Hornet has spoken to both Sony and Activision. Their response has ultimately been, that this is a software issue with CoD and as such further queries should be raised with the game developers, Infinity Ward. Essentially the issue only seems to affect some users of the game. For Hornet 2007-2008, our sampling showed around 50% of PS3 users trying to play this game were affected. Some encountered error messages and it would not work for them. For others it worked fine.

We even had next door neighbours living in the same flat. Identical hardware, same game, same network infrastructure connecting them to the Internet. It worked for one and not the other. Even moving consoles around didn’t help. In February there was some hope that a patch might solve the issue:

PS3 – EU Connectivty Patch Passes Certification
February 7, 2008 in Playstation 3, call of duty 4 modern warfare, community, patch

Heads up for our PS3 players in European (and anywhere else besides Japan / Korea) as rumor out of SCEE today is that the EU Connectivity patch designed to optimize connectivity and matchmaking for users as well as allow them to re-connect to international friends has passed certification and could be on it’s way to EU PS3 users as soon as Friday the 8th. Don’t hold me to it, as I can’t speak for them, but that seems to be the goal.

This patch was already released for US users, so all others users can expect to see a lot more of their European friends back online. Also, before you ask, this should apply to Australian and all other users besides Japan and Korea as those are separate from SCEE (Japan = SCEJ / Korea = SCEK or SCEI), but you shouldn’t be too much longer either according to my intel.

Note: This patch is to NOT be confused with the future feature patch or updates for any other users. This is purely for non-us users and is purely the connectivity patch that was released in the US prior for PS3 users.

Unfortunately this patch doesn’t seem to have improved things for the affected users. The issue is not the P2P method for hosting/playing games on CoD that is causing the problems. If it was then users wouldn’t be able to connect at all to CoD4 or play other games and it would affect everyone trying to use the game. We believe it’s an issue somewhere between the PGN gamertags, cached settings and the IW servers.