COD3 multiplayer issue work arounds

Looks like Call of Duty is plagued with as many ranked match bugs as Gears of War. Infinity Ward hears your cries for help and is actively working on a fix. In the mean time, they encourage you to post the problems you are having over on xbox.com's forum for Call of Duty which will help them make a good patch that actually fixes the problems.

For now, here is Infinity Ward's PR forum poster, fourzerotwo's tips:

Ranked Match

Due to the extremely high volume of players attempting to join Ranked Matches simultaneously upon initial release of the game, the Quick Match option may have difficulty matching players together. As a workaround, it is recommended that players join Ranked Matches through the "Custom Match" option. Custom Match searches may take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to find adequate matches for your game. It is recommended that all players give the Ranked Match search a minimum of 30 seconds to complete - continually searching, cancelling, and searching again within a matter of a few seconds causes the overall environment of Ranked Matches over Xbox Live less stable.

Player Match

When a player chooses Player Match, the game returns a session list of the first 50 games that match the search query. Each of those games has a quality rating of 1 - 5 stars. Players should always join games with 4 or 5 stars to ensure that they have a good connection with the host. If the game is still not joinable with 4 or 5 stars, it means that another player in that game does not have the ability to connect directly to you. This situation is typically caused when one player has a strict NAT on their router or has a very poor internet connection quality. In order to improve these conditions, all players should follow the instructions posted below to open up their Xbox 360 connection to the internet.

Modem & Router Configurations

It is recommended that players make use of a direct internet connection from their Xbox 360 to their modem without the use of a router to ensure the most open networking environment. If a router must be used, please refer to Microsoft's list of approved routers and follow their instructions for enabling DMZ or port forwarding. When you run your connectivity test on the Xbox 360, the end result that you want is that your “NAT” setting returns a value of “Open”.

Please have patience as we continue to work through any and all problems that are encountered. We assure you that we want the best possible gaming experience for our users, and we are working our hardest to improve the situation.

Tips via Xbox.com