Last year, when Microsoft introduced the Party system on the Xbox360, it was awesome. Everytime we (my friend Paul and I) played COD4, we just setup a Party and we could just chit-chat while playing Hardcore Team Deathmatch or whatever mode we were in for. Telling each other about a funny moment, a good kill or some nasty player. Or just talk about our social life whatever. Those were the days.
But now with Modern Warfare 2 (which is awesome btw) this isn’t possible anymore. Everytime you join a game while in a Party, you’re asked to switch to Game Chat. And if you decline, you’ll be kicked from the game. Auch!
So we tried the alternative, switch to Game chat, just mute everyone else and do our regular chit-chat. But this made everyone in our team pissed off… because we speak Dutch and everyone keeps on nagging they don’t understand and want everyone to talk English. Very understandable… but we want to chit-chat!
And finally I found the solution while playing some more Modern Warfare 2 last night with my friend. We now don’t join a Xbox Party… we do the following:
– start a Chat with the other player (just a regular chat, it’s Chat / IM or something like that).
– just start up Modern Warfare 2 and invite the other player to your ingame (!) party. Now you’ll be able to join up, play in the same team and even see each other as a blue arrow in the radar – just as always…
– but you can just keep on chatting with each other, don’t bother the other players and don’t have to mute everyone else.
It’s a win-win-win this way. It only takes 2 steps more. The Xbox Party was way more easy… but ok… this works. The only downside is, this probably only works if you want to chat with one friend… if you want to chat with multiple friends… this solution won’t work (I guess, haven’t tried it thou).
Good luck guys and hope IW will fix this later – if enough people show they want to be able to chit-chat while playing. That’s the whole reason Xbox Party was invented in the first way.
