If you signed up for the 'Call of Duty Elite Premium' service on the launch day of Modern Warfare 3 last year - thus making you an 'early adopter' - you can look forward to an extra three-and-a-bit months of service. This is Activision's way of apologising for the outages that affected Elite at launch. As Joystiq report, when that extra time is up - on March 1st 2013 - Modern Warfare 3's Elite service is going to go completely free. Upon that date, your Premium service will continue as normal (with all the same features), but you won't have to pay a penny.
To make things extra confusing, when CoD Elite goes live for Black Ops II next week, it's also going to be free, as we mentioned a couple of weeks ago . However, Black Ops II players won't get Modern Warfare 3's Premium features by default - only MW3 Premium members will.
It's a frankly convoluted state of affairs, but at least it's one that isn't asking for any more of your money - whether you plan on migrating to Black Ops II, or carrying on with Modern Warfare 3, you won't have to shell out for CoD Elite.
