Battlefield: Bad Company 2 won't put up a fight against XBL party chat

I'd say the absence of party chat has been a fairly big issue for myself and my friends. Though to be honest, it it hasn't kept me from playing the game regularly... yet.

We stick to the Ground War playlist out of necessity. Which is unfortunate, because we rather enjoyed and played some of the other party chat restricted playlists (like Headquarters and Hardcore) regularly in past Call of Duty games.

The reason I said *necessity* and not preference is because of the necessity of staying in contact with friends through party chat as a result of the unreliability of Infinity Ward's matchmaking network.

Friends and parties regularly get dumped and split up from games, and without the use of party chat we would never know when we lose someone (or at least not right away), and it would make getting everyone back together a whole lot harder.

Now in terms of preference, I'd say the removal of party chat in *any* game is a step backwards in my eyes. I often game with several friends at a time and we have no desire to interact verbally with the general gaming populace.

My friends and I all are all adults and have little stomach for the racial & sexual slurs that are bandied about with regularity. Nor do we care to be screamed at by those that feel they were personally wronged by the simple fact that we beat them at a game. We just want to relax and shoot the shit with friends while we enjoy the game from the comfort of our own homes.

I find it hard to believe that were really that many people out there that felt so wronged by and that the balance of the game was that far off in playlists like HQ and S&D by the actions of people locating and announcing the location of others after a death. At least not more than those that would actually prefer there to be party chat in all playlists.

Maybe I'm wrong about that, but there had to have been some other, more elegant solution to keep all happy. Like maybe restricting the view to a first-person one of a teammate after you die? If they can already alternate between first person and third person for a death camera and spectator view, certainly that could have been an easy option to enact.

As much we enjoy IW's actual game, the mechanics of everything else leading up to playing it leave something major to be desired. The unfortunate thing is that Treyarch got a lot of those things right in World at War, and they are nowhere to be found here. This may be blasphemy to some, but let's just say that whenever the next Call of Duty installment by Treyarch comes out, we won't be looking back with regret as we move onto that game.

Who knows, maybe we'll give Bad Company 2 a shot before that...

Modern Warfare 2 did so much good to the Gaming Community! :)

Now Features that before were default things you didn't even had to think about, they were just there because everybody had them of course, now can be praised in News and Ad's again as if they were something New or Special!

[/sarcasm]

Party Chat killed online games. Now every game I join half 75% of the players either don't have a mic or are in party chat. Makes trying to play a team game really fun. "Behind you!" oh too late. "They're taking the cannon!" oh too late. "Hey retards, they just walked by you!" oh too late.

If theres one good thing about MW2 it's that it doesn't allow you to do a cooperative gametype without being in the same channel as your partners.

I having a hard time understanding how you can cheat in a game where you can re spawn every time when you die. A game like this require you to communicate with your clan or team mates.Of course I"m talking about MW2.

Not a dealbreaker nor has it been an issue for me. I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion from the start. Not surprising considering the amount of diaper babies here on the net.

Party chat really is important to me. Before this, I almost never played in game chat. I don't wear my headset when I'm playing by myself, and I'm in a party when I'm talking to my friends. Thats the way I prefer it. I just can't stand what the talk on XBL has become. Its nothing worth listening to. And even when my friends and I DO play together and are in game chat, no one else ever talks, so its just as if we were in a private party chat. Thats not fair, I shouldn't say never, but most of the time.

Infinity Ward's issues with party chat are ridiculous, IMO ... I suck at online multi-player play anyway, so party chat sure as hell doesn't help!

It bugs me that MW2 doesn't support party chat. You form a party and go into games in MW2, it'd be nice if you could chat with just those people. It beats having to mute everyone else every single match.

I still don't understand why IW disabled Party Chat for most of the gametypes. The only "cheating" I can imagine is two friends being on different teams in the same party chat, with one of them telling the other the locations of enemies. Perhaps my imagination fails me. But even then, there's no way in MW2 to ensure that you'll be on different teams. And even beyond that, you can playing Mercenary TDM with Live Party Chat, and do the same thing I just described.

As far as the actual communication goes, if IW wanted people on the same team to communicate, they forgot that the large majority of people on Live are intolerably obnoxious. I have my privacy settings set so that I can only hear people on my friends list, and so do they. So we basically have our own party chat anyway, it's just unfortunate that we may be talking over someone else. In our defense, it's on Live, so whoever we're talking over is probably calling us a variety of racial slurs.

It freaking sucks that i have to listen to 12 year olds sing, scream and whatever when I would just like to play team deathmatch talking to my friends. I understand why party chat is not in search and destroy.. But come on.. no party chat in most of the other game modes suck. I know I can mute the kids and stoners, racists out.. but i have to do it all the time..

Party chat is a big deal this time around, mainly due to Modern Warfare 2's pathetic matchmaking system. When lobbies merge, party members are frequently lost, dropped, or otherwise left out. With no party chat to see who is or isn't there quickly, one must regularly back out of the lobby and regroup through invites, etc.

It's a pain in the ass and it happens much too frequently for a developer like Infinity Ward to rest on their laurels. Good on DICE for giving players more - not less - options when playing multiplayer.

I don't play MW2 so that I can listen to complete strangers curse at me, breathe heavily, sing loudly (and terribly), or spout off in a different language. If I happen to get into a party with a few somewhat normal people, I don't mind chatting about game-related topics or relaying strategic info with random team members. But for the most part, I play this game so I can "hang out" with my friends! I have about 8 RL friends that I try to play with a few nights a week. I'd like to be able to talk to them as we play! Is that really so hard?

I end up muting everyone who is obnoxious in an attempt to preserve my sanity, which is often 3 or 4 people per game. I've been hoping for IW to fix this, or at least enable party chat for more game types. I can understand how some people could use it to cheat in certain lobbies, but honestly that never even entered my mind. I play this to have fun. Not being able to talk to my friends? Less fun.

It's important to me because I play with my nephew and my son. My son has a kids account but I have his online voice access limited to those in his friends list. We have 2 tv's setup side by side with 2 xbox's. If we want to play online in CODMW2 one of us cannot talk to my nephew now where as in every other game we can . I don't want to subject my kid to all the nastiness that happens online. Being a responsible parent I'm being penalized by infinity wards new policy.
But on to EA's problems. EA doesn't allow a kids account to even play their M rated games online. That means you could be 16 and not be able to play even with your parents permission. They've taken it upon themselves to police their own games. They are the only dev to do this and it really irks me. I would have never setup my kids account as such if I new they could do this. So EA can advertise whatever they want it doesn't really matter for the people it might affect the most.

I have my XBL privacy settings set so I can only communicate with people who are on my friends list anyways. So if I am playing MW2 with some friends who are on my friends list, as long as we are in the same game, it is basically the same as playing in party chat. And I don't have to listen to all the other basically pointless babblings of strangers.

i am glad that bf:bd2 are keeping party chat. mw2 is silly if i want to cheat even with out party chat i can still do it. now i just seem to get in to alot more arguments coz people can hear me speak my mind.

infinity ward made a big mistake.

Preach! never have I ever played a game with so many random racists on at one time.

And also, why can you do party chat in Ground War, which is Domination and Team Deathmatch games, but not just Team Deathmatch. It's like here, you can have what you want, but you have to play Domination too. WTF?

Was it really that hard to get rid of Party Chat? The only purpose for removing it would be Search and Destroy, can anyone think of any other game type that would benefit from removing party chat??

Private chat still works. Cheaters can use that. Removing party chat just shows the flaws in the game. If you try to join a match with friends, and some don't make it, it's just that much harder to get into a game together because all of a sudden you aren't chatting with them. That's a common MW (1&2) issue. All removing party chat did was make it really inconvenient to play. Yes you can set your chat to friends only, but then if your friends invite people to the game, you can't hear them. That was the whole point of party chat. Was chat cheating really that big of a problem?

I agree with what I saw someone say here: Too many snipers in the BFBC2 beta. It is what people do when they are afraid to get in there themselves. Do not get me wrong, there need to be some snipers to lay covering fire and get clutch kills but there does not need to be an entire squad of just snipers. It especially pisses me off when my team are the defenders and the attackers arm the bomb and these snipers do nothing to contribute to the defense... all they care about is their precious kill/death ratio and it breaks the game and the fun of playing. Honestly one can hope that this will change when someone actually pays for the game but let us be honest here... that will not happen. Take your deathmatch "skills" to MW2 (which I happen to enjoy for entirely different reasons). /rant

i miss party chat. i use it so i can talk to my friends. they are people that i actually know and really could care less about listening to a 14 yr old boy sing Katy Perry songs at the top of his lungs. yes i know you can mute people, but still. i liked party chat and wish IW would make a patch to allow it.

It's really annoying when I'm trying to get a room going in L4D2 or some other game, and I can't just jump into my friend's party that are in MW2 and ask them if they'd be up for it when they finish that match.

If it wasn't such a great game I would have skipped it because of the disabled party chat. Actually, I did skip it, but my damn friends bought me a copy so I'd stop hounding them to play l4d 2.
Solution (because infinity ward is stupid to think making it inconvenient is the same as stopping it) is to play like a PC gamer and just install ventrillo or teamspeak. Thankfully, one of my old PC buddies still rents a server so we just use his as our base of operations and have our headsets synced with our PCs. We set our 360 mics to disabled and boom. No problems. now I don't have the option to invite a good player into our party chat, but at least the tweens, K. Real Keazy's and the hilbillies have there space to talk, and we have ours...
Sure I wish I could use the service I pay for every year, but then, I guess we don't really own the game or the platform of our pastime anymore... those were the days.

You mean lag bubbles? I think "cheating" is the official reasoning they could give without defacing MS, but the lag party chat creates in online games is what concerns me more about this feature.

Personally, I'm glad MW2 doesn't allow it in some lists. It helps keep things relatively lag-free, and it's so easy to just mute everyone else. Though, i do wish IW had provided a "mute everyone who's not in your party" option.

wow EA is just riding Infinity Wards dick hard aren't they.

There is party chat in MW2, just not in all game types. I really dont care for the party chat. Most of the friends on my friends list are there because I was chatting it up with them during a game and decided I would add them. If I had never talked to them during a game I probaby would never have added them to my friends list. To me the party chat somewhat ruins the online interaction.

Also, I dont know who the hell you guys are playing with that you need to mute an entire team. Last night I had to mute one person. Other than that most of the people werent saying anything. Thats the way it is most of the time.

p.s. After looking at this place I can assume I would mute most of you guys. Most of you act like timmies here so im sure it wouldnt be any different during an online game.

If Bad Company 2 does include party chat, and Modern Warfare 2 doesn't fix the fact that it's lacking party chat; i can guarantee my friends and I will move on to Bad Company 2. The lack of party chat in MW2 is pathetic. I can't enjoy a converstaion with my friends while I'm gaming, and that's just not acceptable. I don't care what other people need to talk about in game.

I find now, I spend a lot less time chatting with friends, because I don't want other people hearing our conversations, it's none of their business. And we only like playing Hardcore.

Infinity Ward better get their act together. They're the top dog right now, and that means every other company involved in making war games is gunning for them.

They won't put up a fight because no one plays Battlefield competitively enough for it to matter.


Also, it still takes 500 bullets to kill people in this game. Lame.

I think party chat is extremely important. I don't think we should be forced to listen to screaming 12 year olds, and blatant (usually) unprovoked racism. It's really annoying.

The main reason I don't like playing MW2 online as much as COD4 is because you can't be in a party while online. I personally don't want to hear other peoples voices complaining about everything. I would much rather just chat with my buddies and not worry about the other people in the room. Just my input.

The boon of party chat for me is to only be able to hear my friends. Almost no one makes an attempt at using in-game chat for team strategy, and I cannot stand the foul-mouthed children, racists, rappers, e-thugs, and people that set their headsets down on the radio. Infinity Ward thought they were clever in disabling party chat, but I combat that with the following techniques:

1. Disable the ability to hear anyone but people on my friends list.

2. Just muting everyone in the lobby who isn't in my party.

What do you think of that, Infinity Ward? Gamers = 1, IW = 0.