Call of Duty Elite Fail 100%..Their words, not mine.

I know I've gone off about Activision EPIC FAIL that is called in-house Call of Duty Elite.

The thing is.....while they've been diligent about adding in-game content, they haven't bothered to fix the very thing that is supposed to be driving these add-on sales: Call of Duty Elite.  To a certain extent I get it....they already have our money so why bother doing anything other than finishing up the new maps they've been working on.  Once something is out the door....[expletive] 'em!


I regularly play with about six other guys in a Call of Duty Clan of 11.  We have been doing great working together as a clan and now have more Gold medals for Clan Operations than we do Silver and Bronze combined.  Each Clan Op is a theme: most confirmed kills, most dominations, etc.  If you perform even one objective (kill, domination, etc.) you get a Bronze Medal and some clan XP.  Place in the top 50% and you get a Silver, top 10% nets your Clan a Gold Medal.

While we have been doing good, I suspect something that helps tremendously is that there are many clans with only a few members.

Anyhoo....the fine folks at Activision decided that instead of fixing things that were broken with Elite...namely the entire interface, they'd institute some new Clan "stuff", namely Clan Challenges.  I stumbled upon this when I discovered our Clan Leader won some Challenges......but how?  The results are listed in the Xbox360 Call of Duty Elite program, but no mention of Challenges otherwise.  There is no way to realize they even exist using the program you had to pay for......

If you go online, you can see that there are Challenges and you can read a one-liner about what they are.  For a brief moment I was able to get to a page that showed our Clan was enlisted and that nothing had been registered yet.  The current Challenge is to get the most knife kills, as indicated from winning accolades after the match (be the top player doing something).

Here's another rub: the Challenge is poorly defined.

Is it any knife kills?  Everyone has a melee attack with a knife available.  If you get the most melee knife attack kills you get the Switchblade Accolade.  The thing is that there is another knife in the game, a throwing knife, and if you get the most kills with that you get the Butcher Accolade.  Both accolades look just like this:

Seriously Activision?  You couldn't be bothered to accurately define exactly what is required to complete these challenges?  Is it melee knife or throwing knife....maybe both?  It wouldn't take much to either specify in the brief text or simply name the appropriate accolade!

Tomorrow we have the same deal. The Challenge is for pistol kills.  OK....what do you mean by pistol?  There is a class of secondary weapons called "Machine Pistols" and another class called "Handguns".  I think most people, when thinking of pistols, would gravitate towards the weapons listed as "Handguns".  Fortunately we have only one accolade for pistols, and that is the Hard Boiled Accolade.  Now I just don't know if machine pistols count or not.....

Finally......good luck getting any real information about the Challenges.  While I was able to see something once, logging into the Call of Duty Elite website, now whenever I click on anything dealing with a Challenge I get this custom 404 page.

Oh the irony.....

Evening Update: The Elite website seems to be functioning now and when you "drill down" to get details on the specific Clan Challenge it is now listing the exact Accolade needed to score.  This information is still not available on the Xbox app.