Modern Warfare 3 URL Redirects to Battlefield 3 Site

**MrRaverX** Wed Aug 03, 2011 5:13 pm

EA has made it all too clear that it wants to slit the throat of the Call of Duty franchise, as it readies its impressive looking Battlefield 3 to go head to head with Modern Warfare 3 later this year. But today the publisher resorted to some dirty tactics, or so it seemed at first.

Gaming news sites and Twitter feeds lit up over the past 24 hours when it was discovered that the URL www.modernwarfare3.com was automatically redirecting to www.battlefield.com/battlefield3, EA's official site for its upcoming shooter.

It was assumed by most that the forwarding URL had been set up by EA itself, as part of a cheap campaign to lure away unsuspecting Call of Duty fans, but website Net Media Now did some digging and discovered that the www.modernwarfare3.com site had previously been set up as some kind of "fishy beta sign up scheme" with no apparent ties to EA. Thanks to Google cache, an earlier version of the site was found complete with a video attacking one of the official Modern Warfare 3 trailers, and this caustic fine print:

"Modern Warfare is crap. On November 8, 2011, the most over-hyped first-person action series of all-time returns with the copy and paste sequel to the lackluster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Check out the E3 2011 gameplay demo featuring the Black Tuesday level for a look at the epic fail of the campaign. Pre-Order Call of Duty MW3 Today for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC to secure exclusive bonuses only available online for Modern Warfare 3 fanboys who don't know that Battlefield 3 is the better game."

Hardly the sort of messaging that EA would employ despite the apparent fierceness of the competition between the two publishers, and given the potential legal ramifications at stake it's likely just the work of a troublemaking fan.

Ultimately the most baffling part of the whole affair is this: games publishers typically register every possible domain name variation for each of their big game releases, so why on earth does Activision not own the www.modernwarfare3.com domain already?