At one point, having spent the an hour or so staring at the Modern Warfare 2 party screen, one of our party members said, sarcastically, “This is the best sixty bucks I’ve ever spent.”

The response? “Yeah, if we’d wanted to wait this long just to get into a game, we could’ve played Gears of War 2.”

The problem was, it wasn’t just the waiting. This was a problem we’ve had before (With Call of Duty 4, I believe): we’re in a party, we join a game, all of us are in the pre-game lobby, and just before the game starts, one or two of us are kicked back to the party lobby. At that point, whoever’s in the game can’t quit without getting penalized, which means that the “leftover” team has to either find something else to do for a while or wait.

The problem is made worse by the absolutely idiotic decision to disallow party chat during some game types (where “some game types” means “every game type you have access to when you start playing the game”). So, the process now goes like this: the party’s in party chat, and we join a lobby. Immediately, we’re removed from party chat and kicked to the in game chat, where we are “treated” to a dozen or so immature frat boys (and their sixth grade counterparts, who are often more mature, but somewhat chattier). We tolerate this for a minute or two, the game starts, and two members find themselves back in the party lobby. We’re now unable to tell our party members that we were kicked out (because God forbid we should be able to talk to our friends… thanks, Infinity Ward!), which makes the fact that we were separated from the game that much worse.

There’s no evidence that the booting is related to anyone’s connections being bad – the person “booted” is usually not the same person, and we can almost always find our way into another game with a very good connection speed beside our names. If that is the issue, IW and Microsoft need to make that clearer – if there’s something wrong with our connections (something that, I might add, doesn’t seem to interfere with any other games), we can fix it.

Like I said, though, that’s an issue we’ve hit before, and we dealt with it. The breaking of the party chat, though, is nearly unforgivable, and it’s only because I’ve already spent the money (and it’s not like I can return it now) that I’ll continue to play this game.

I can think of no good reason to break party chat this way. There’s no way it can be used to cheat, to my knowledge, since it’s only effective in-game if you’re on the same team, in which case you can talk to each other anyway. Contrast that with a game like, say, Chromehounds, which would have a perfectly good reason to break party chat – the idea that you can go out of contact with one another is a major factor of the game’s atmosphere.

One could say that it promotes team play, but my immediate reaction whenever I have to join a game with chattering twelve-year-olds or drunken idiotic frat boys (Oops, I repeat myself) is to mute everyone in the game except for the people I want to talk to (i.e., my party). Listening to the people on my team won’t promote team play – it will promote team killing.

I’ve never friended anyone on Xbox Live except those people I knew outside of Xbox Live or people who joined our games because they knew people I knew outside of Xbox Live. I have no interest in trying to make new friends via Live – the signal-to-noise ratio there would make trying to find a halfway likable person nigh-impossible (especially since the likable people are either silent or in their own party chats) anyway.

I realize it’s probably too late to save anyone’s money (and even if it weren’t, 97% of the people who read this blog were in my party last night anyway), but if you value the party chat feature, save your money until Infinity Ward and Microsoft come to their senses and fix this issue.