According to Microsoft’s Major Nelson’s report, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has retaken the #1 spot as the most played game on Xbox LIVE, knocking GTAIV to the #3 spot. This is on the heels of the news that we just passed the 10 million copies sold mark!

THANK YOU to everyone who consistently continues to play the game every night!! To show our appreciation, as always we’re going to be holding a Double XP Weekend this weekend starting Friday morning and going till Monday (yes I know… we always say that, but we’re really going to cut it off at Monday this time… maybe).

The Double XP will be available in ALL PLAYLISTS and will be on both platforms Xbox 360 and PS3!

In addition, we will be tweaking all the playlist map rotations a bit so that the Variety Map Pack no longer shows up 2:1 to old maps. Therefore all maps (old and new) have an equal chance to come up in map rotation, so you won’t be seeing Chinatown pop up 8,000 times or any other new map over and over again.

Thanks again to EVERYONE who continues to support the game and keep it at the top of the charts. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the COD4 T-shirt designs we’re working on and let us know which ones we should get printed up, because we’ll be giving away a lot of them to our loyal players when we do as well as making them available to you on the new Infinityward.com Online store that will launch in late June with the new site.

See you online!

The ‘Most Played Games on Xbox Live’ list has been posted yet again on Major Nelson’s blog, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has been holding onto the #1 spot for several months now. We revealed recently in a Eurogamer article that there are between 1.2 and 1.3 million gamers playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on Xbox Live EVERYDAY! With the numbers on PSN being “monstrously huge” in the words of our Producer, Mark Rubin.

So when I post the Top Games of Xbox Live update every few weeks, think of it as a huge thanks to all of you guys, those 1.3 million of you who are logging into multiplayer every day to shoot each other in the face; because without you it wouldn’t be possible.

With the Variety map pack hitting this past week and a record breaking amount of people downloading them, I hope we can keep that number one spot for a while and make anyone who takes it from us really have to fight for it.

To continue to show our appreciation for you guys logging in every night, and to celebrate the success of the map pack (also the fact that we’ve gone insane), we’ll be extending DOUBLE XP AGAIN! You can continue to get double XP throughout today (Tuesday) until Wednesday morning….. then that’s it….. seriously…. no more after Wednesday morning…. I mean it this time.

Seriously though, thank you thank you thank you for all the support you guys have shown the game. We by far have the greatest game community I’ve ever been a part of (as a gamer).

I’m going to be talking with Major Nelson later this week (tomorrow or the next day) on his Podcast here at GDC and I’m sure the “ping pong” match for the “King of Xbox Live” between Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 will probably be amongst the things we talk about.

Well, I’m off to the awards, I’ll post another quick update after the awards and let you know how we fare. Thanks everyone!!

Update –

1up Awards re-cap:

10:00 PM and back at the hotel after the 1up Awards. We didn’t take home the top prize this time, the 1up Readers Choice GOTY award went to the well-deserved Bioshock.

There’s another award show tomorrow night, the GDC Choice awards, I’m gonna try to make that one, not sure if it interferes with any interview schedules yet, but if not I’ll be sure to attend and let you know how that one goes! Gonna go to sleep a bit early tonight as interviews start first thing tomorrow morning and go all day long so I’ll need the rest. See ya tomorrow guys!

Once again, Major Nelson has posted the Top Games on Xbox Live stats for the week of 2/4 and as I called it last week (post), Call of Duty 4 is managing to stay at #1 as the most played game on Xbox Live thanks to everyone’s continued support!

We won’t let you guys down in terms of returning the support either as we have already shipped the Xbox 360 feature patch off to certification with a few new features I talked about yesterday (New Quick Mute Option), as well as some increased spawn locations on maps, and general connectivity improvements that I forgot to mention last post. As well as are still working hard on the new DLC maps. I can’t let out details on them just yet, but I can say that I may just have a new favorite map (sorry Crash) within this batch of new maps.

I can tell you that I’ll be heading up to GDC (Game Developers Conference) next week (Tuesday - Friday) attending the 1up Awards and hanging out with some of my friends in the gaming press, so I wouldn’t be surprised if DLC was the subject of the trip. As the maps are already a lot of fun and look amazing, so I’m anxious to finally start talking about them.

Other than that, once I get back from GDC in San Francisco next week, it’ll almost be time for SXSW where I’ll be talking about Pro Gaming and Pro Gamers, which is lines up nicely with the recent MLG announcement.

That’s it for news, for a rant about Team Killing in Hardcore, keep reading.

Alright, whats the deal guys!?

What’s with this Team Killing phenomenon in Hardcore mode? I’ve noticed an increase in a new Hardcore tactic where players will team kill their own team mate in last stand, to prevent the other team from getting the kill. Douchebag move? Or Valid tactic?

I haven’t yet decided. Although it’s frustrating as hell to get your kill taken away, but is it something that should be prevented or more severely punished? What’s your thoughts?

We had this discussion about a week back, whether we should take some action to prevent or discourage this tactic, and we decided against it but I thought it’d be good to get the community feedback on it as I’m currently on the fence on this one. Do you think players should be punished for team killing their team mates in last stand, to prevent the other team from getting the kill?

I mean, we already tack on a spawn delay, and instant death for team killing, is that enough?

Feel free to leave your feedback on the subject in the comments as well as feedback on Team Killing in Hardcore in general. Is there more that needs to be done?

This battle for the #1 spot has been causing a surge of “Call of Duty 4 vs Halo 3″ articles and forum debates, and I don’t think the question is necessarily as easy as “which game is better”, because that’s all just opinions. Both amazing games, the question I have is who will stay on top, and do I think we can stay on top?

So can we stay on top? Yes.

Why do I think that? Well…

I fully expect to be battling for the #1 spot back and forth with Halo at the moment, it’s a great game with a huge following, but I also know we have a hardcore community of players not to mention have quite a few things up our sleeves for the game (some announced / some unannounced).

Reason #1 — Upcoming Feature Patch:

 New Kill Cams

We’re currently finishing up testing a feature patch thats going to bring a lot of enhancements and new features to the multiplayer overall that a lot of the community’s going to love. From Host Migration so when the host leaves you don’t have to research and re-invite everyone, you’ll all stick together and just assign a new host, to new Kill Cams for everything. So now those “WTF!” grenades that seemingly come from no where, you can see that a guy threw it over the house, it hit a tree branch, bounced off a rock, into a tiny window, where you happened to be pointing out of, and say…… whoa. Follow behind RPGs and M203’s kill cams, claymores, Airstrikes where you can follow the bomb from the plane until it hits you.

Host Migration:

Now you won’t have to be dropped back by yoursef when a host leaves. Instead, everyone will stay together, a new host will be assigned, and the game will auto-start back up. Keeping everyone together, no more re-inviting, re-joining games because some host leaves. This has been a tall order and something that we’ve put a lot of work into which has allowed us to really optimize online play all around not just specifically with Host migration.

Improved Sniper / ACOG Accuracy:

Sniper and ACOG scopes have been tweaked and are really improved. I use to not snipe at all (mainly because I’m a horrible sniper), but now it’s so much more fluid and natural, while still having the same difficulty to use, it has no more “WTF I know I hit that guy!” moments.

Upgraded Spectator Cam:

Now when you’re in spectator mode you can follow them in 3rd person, switch to their first person view, or rotate the camera in a full 360 degrees around whoever you’re watching.

[PATCH STATUS: Still in test, we're currently heavily testing the Host Migration before we submit it for certification at Microsoft. So heavily, we currently have the most highly paid test team ever as everyone here at IW is currently help test it, not just the QA department, we have the programmers in there right now actively working to push this thing out as quickly as possible as well as we've all been doing daily take home tests to get time on it even after the day has ended. Great progress happening on it.]

 Reason # 2 — Working on new DLC Maps:

The patch isn’t the only thing heading to multiplayer that we’re working on behind the scenes here at Infinity Ward. I announced at the beginning of this week that we’re also working on some brand new maps for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and trust me, based on the feedback were getting regarding what type of new maps you guys what, you’re not going to be disappointed. We’re putting a lot of community involvement, ideas, and feedback into these maps and I can tell you right now that some of the ones we’re working on are exactly what some of you have asked for. Can’t wait to share more details with you when we get a bit further done and start showing them off a bit. Thanks to everyone who has been commenting on the New Maps post.

Reason # 3 - Possibility of new Playlists

We’ve been throwing around new playlist ideas here at the office on ways we can constantly be updating the multiplayer experience for you guys (the community). Try out a few different ideas, see how you guys like them, if it’s gold, we keep it. This sounds like a perfect question for anyone who reads this blog, you guys had great feedback on what you think would make a good map, so what do you think would make a good playlists?

Hardcore Headquarters? I know a few of you have IM’d me that.

Maybe some Team Survival? Essentially just Team Deathmatch with no respawns, last man standing wins.

I would love to get some Hardcore Team Survival going, now that would be some serious shit. No Health Re-gen, no Respawns, just you, your weapon and your 1 life. What do you think? If you could fully customize a gametype (which you can in private match) what would be the rules? What would you call it? Hell, maybe we’ll try it out. I’m being 100% serious too, I’m interested in hearing what you think makes a good game type cause I’d really love to see what we can do to test some out.

Conclusion

Those, among other things, makes me confident we can stay at #1 for quite a while with the support of the community keeping the game fun and fresh.  So let’s do it, I’m gonna be gathering up a group of the IW guys and start playing at a dedicated time / day each week, maybe we’ll kick it off tomorrow night? Who’s down for some Hardcore Search and Destroy tomorrow night around 8 pm PST? Regretfully my friends list is full, so I can’t add every friend request I receive but I figured if we have a dedicated gaming night where we know a lot of you and a lot of us (IW) are all going to be on, pick a specific playlist for the night, we’ll all have a much better chance of running into each other online. See you online and be sure to comment with your Playlist ideas.