Activision today has finally announced a subscription service for its popular Call of Duty game series providing gamers with stats for their play and some social features.

The service goes by the name Call of Duty: Elite and will launch as a beta this summer with support for last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops. With Call of Duty: Elite, players will be able to keep track of their kill-death ratio, winning percentage, XP, and earnings rom the web or through an app on their smartphone.

Those number will be joined by information on just how well players performed in their most recent multiplayer games. CoD:E will help players boost their numbers with layouts of maps complete with heatmaps for where they commonly die. There will tips for each map detailing information such as which guns and perks to use.

Activision will be bringing social aspects into Call of Duty: Elite to help connect players to one another. Players will be able to use hastags similar to those on Twitter to form groups around just about anything. Just add a # symbol in front of a word and you have a new group. Players can join up to 64 hashtag groups.

Also part of the social features is Theater, which let's player create videos from moments in the games. The videos can be put up on YouTube for everyone to see. Perhaps more interesting is that all players in each video will be identified using the metadata of the game the video was taken for. Sounds like players will be tagged in videos so they know for sure if they're involved in a killstreak video.

Call of Duty: Elite will launch in full alongside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on November 8, 2011. The system will be freemium, with paid users getting more perks such as discounts or free DLC for the games. So, pay for Elite, and not only do you get all the stat-tracking and social features, but you also get all the new maps. We don't know everything the paid users will get just yet, but we should find out at least before the launch of Modern Warfare 3.

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