With the military shooter battle between Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 shaping up to be one of the most intense rivalries in video game history, we've been waiting for more shots to be fired between the soon-to-be-warring factions. Consider this the latest escalation.

Aggregame points out the rather surprising news that ModernWarfare3.com, a domain you'd assume Activision would have purchased years ago, currently redirects visitors to the Battlefield 3 website. This redirect just went into place yesterday, but the ModernWarfare3.com domain was registered via GoDaddy in 2009.

Some have speculated that EA itself is behind this bold move, but the more likely scenario is that some devoted Battlefield fans (or devoted Activision haters) registered the domain before Activision thought of it and just now put this into place as a blow against the publisher.

If that's not enough goofiness for you, ModernWarfare4.com was also registered by someone other than Activision. The devoted PC gamer who picked up this domain is angry at Activision for removing dedicated servers from Modern Warfare 2 and is currently running a poll to help figure out what to do with the domain that the publisher would presumably eventually want to use.

The lesson? Publishers, get those domains registered early and often, even if it means rumor stories running on all of the blogs.

[Thanks to Austin for the news tip.]