Here’s A Workaround To Invite Friends [Updated]

Updated 11/17/22. See update below.

If you’re having the same issues I’m having with Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2 today, I guess we can console ourselves in an old saying: Misery loves company.

Season 1 of Modern Warfare II and the launch of Warzone 2.0 kicked off a bunch of new content this morning, but also a suite of new problems.

One of the most irritating and potentially fun-ruining of these is the breaking of the social menu. When I click on the top right corner to access my friends and party, it starts to load and then kicks me back to the main screen. I can’t access any of my friends, recent players, parties etc.

The same bug has been impacting my squad-mates all day as well (after some matchmaking issues confounded us after last night’s update as well).

There is, thankfully, a simple workaround here. The update has added new Voice Channels to Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2.0. These function kind of like Discord. You can have a voice channel set up just for your party, or one that people can access persistently across many matches, similar to a Discord server.

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

You have to make sure to enable voice chat to make this work, of course, but it’s a quick and simple workaround to what hopefully ends up being a very brief problem. A more persistent problem will be the general clumsiness of the menu designs more broadly. That’s going to take some real time and effort to make right.

Read all about today’s launch right here.

UPDATE

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

This is definitely a good thing given how important being able to party up with friends is in a game like Call Of Duty. It’s kind of crazy to me that something so fundamental to the gameplay experience would be broken and not fixed for over a day.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Still, there are other problems that remain. Matchmaking has been a crapshoot even beyond the social menu breaking. Every other match of Warzone we played last night would enter into the warm-up area and slowly drain players until we’d have to leave. Then we’d load into a new match and it would go through just fine. This happened nearly every single time. There needs to be a much quicker timer that activates and starts a match with less than a full lobby, whether that’s 140/150 players or 100/150 players. I’m not sure the exact time, but playing the waiting game is not what we’re here for. We’re here for Warzone and waiting and leaving matches and rejoining over and over again until one starts is deeply tedious and frustrating.

We’ve also had some of the same issues we had when Modern Warfare II launched, when any party larger than 3 would fail to find matches or lead to crashing. It seems many players are experiencing this issue again.

On a side-note, what on earth were they thinking changing the Neon Camos to matte? The ridiculous bright lime green camo I was rocking on my Lockwood 300 is now…boring by comparison. The Neon Blue (Azul I think it’s called) is fine now, but it was bright and splashy and shiny before. By all means, give us solid matte camos also, but don’t mess with our neons! (And please, for the love of all that’s holy, can we just have a vertical camo selection instead of horizontal? Good grief the menus remain terrible by any standard of modern UI design).

Have you had better luck with matchmaking today? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

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