Here is a workaround for inviting friends [Updated]

Updated 11/17/22. See the update below.

If you are having the same issues as me with Modern Warfare II and war zone 2 today, I guess we can take comfort in an old adage: misery loves company.

Season 1 of Modern Warfare II and the launch of war zone 2.0 launched a bunch of new content this morning, but also a host of new issues.

One of the most irritating and potentially fun is the breaking of the social menu. When I click on the top right corner to go to my friends and party, it starts loading and then I’m back to the main screen. I can’t access any of my friends, recent players, groups, etc.

The same bug also impacted my teammates all day (after some matchmaking issues also confused us after last night’s update).

Fortunately, there is a simple workaround here. The update added new voice channels to Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2.0. These work much like Discord. You can have a voice channel set up just for your group, or a channel that people can access persistently across many matches, similar to a Discord server.

By accessing Voice Channels (the tab at the top right of the screen that looks like a headset), you can invite people to your party, launch or promote within your party, and more. Basically, you get most of the functionality from the Social menu, but it’s in the voice channel menu instead.

You need to make sure to enable voice chat for this to work, of course, but it’s a quick and easy workaround to what hopefully ends up being a very brief issue. A more persistent issue will be the general clunkyness of menu designs more broadly. It’s going to take time and real effort to fix it.

Read all about today’s launch here.

UPDATE

Infinity Ward tweeted that the social tab issue has been resolved:

That’s certainly a good thing considering how important being able to party with friends is in a game like Call of Duty. It’s kind of crazy to me that something so fundamental to the gaming experience should be broken and unfixed for more than a day.

Better late than never, I guess.

Yet other problems remain. Matchmaking has been a dice game, even beyond breaking the social menu. All other games of war zone we played last night was entering the warm-up area and slowly draining the players until we had to leave. Then we would load a new match and everything would be fine. This happened almost every time. There needs to be a much faster timer that kicks in and starts a match with less than a full lobby, whether it’s 140/150 players or 100/150 players. I’m not sure of the exact time, but we’re not here to play the waiting game. We are here for war zone and waiting and leaving matches and rejoining again and again until one starts is deeply tedious and frustrating.

We also encountered the same problems as when Modern Warfare II thrown, when a group greater than 3 would fail to find matches or result in a crash. It seems that many players are having this problem again.

By the way, what were they thinking about changing the Neon Camos to matte? The ridiculous bright lime camo I used to rock on my Lockwood 300 is now… boring in comparison. The Neon Blue (Azul I think it’s called) is fine now, but it was bright and splashy and shiny before. Sure, give us solid matte camos too, but don’t mess with our neons! (And please, for the love of all things sacred, can we just have vertical camo selection instead of horizontal? Damn, the menus are still terrible by any design standard. modern user interface).

Did you have better luck with matchmaking today? let me know about Twitter or facebook.

Oh, and I got my first Warzone 2 victory on day one!