Connection Error

So I know this isn't exactly the place to post this, but i've tried steam and MW3 forums to no avail and I know there are a lot of knowledgeable people in this forum..

I can connect to steam just fine and all my games work without issue save MW3. It worked fine when I bought it, but about 2 months ago it stopped being able to connect to online servers. I can play the game offline (campaign, spec ops), but it absolutely refuses to connect to the online servers. I've tried uninstalling the game and redownloading it, verifying game cache, suggested port forwarding, disabling my firewall/anti-virus, static IP, dynamic IP, etc... Absolutely nothing works. I've eliminated the possibility of it being just my internet or router as it won't connect on any of my friend's internet connections either. I really don't want to just accept a waste of $60 so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Before I can help, I have one question. Did you purchase MW3 from another vendor and they provided you a Steam key?

 

No i pre-ordered it on steam before it even came out. Like I said the game worked fine for the first couple months and then just decided it didn't like online play.

 

Banished, what are your specs? You playing over wireless? what's your wireless card?

 

M17X R3 | i7 2630qm | AMD 6970M | 8gb DDR3 1333 | intel wireless ultimate n 6300 | 2x 320gig 7200rpm hdd Raid 0 |

I've tried over wireless and directly plugging an Ethernet cord in. All other games play just fine and I have no problem connecting to the internet.

 

Definitely not a hardware issue. Have you contacted steam regarding your key? Looks like it isn't authenticating on their servers. Are there error messages that come up or does it just time out?

 

I get the message "Error: The Call of Duty MW3 server is not available at this time" I have not tried contacting steam about my key though. Do you think that's the problem?

 

That is what it sounds like to me. I asked where you got it because if you bought it from a vendor and they provided a Steam key, it is likely that you bought a fake key. Its been happening with some of the more popular games, so figured I would ask.

Contact Steam and tell them exactly what you told us. You know its not your internet cause it happens at a friends house.

Though try one more thing before you call. Go to your friends house and log onto your steam account from their PC. This would eliminate anything weird on your system (software-wise).

If it still happens, its definitely with your account. If you can sign in and play, re-examine what software you have installed/running as well as anything downloaded since it started happening. Even little things like changing the TCP/IP packet size could be at fault.

 

Contact Steam directly by shooting them an email. My account got hacked and they resolved it same day.