In a post on NeoGaf that has quickly swept the internet, a rumor has surfaced that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) will be forcing players to exit any private or party chat before being allowed to play online over Xbox Live.

As of this writing, neither Activision or Infinity Ward had responded to inquiries about the post's authenticity, but that hasn't stopped almost every major video game related news site on the internet from posting the rumor. And this is only the latest in a line of strange and controversial decisions surrounding MW2.

I for one hope that the post on NeoGaf is either fake, or only part of the story. It would make a lot of sense for party chat to be disabled for game types that don't have respawns, but it doesn't make sense for other game types which feature an infinite amount of lives. For example: If you are killed in an online game in which you do not have respawns, you must sit and wait until either your team or the opposition has won. But while you are doing so, you could shout out enemy positions to your surviving team mates. Removing Party Chat solves that problem, but by doing so you punish the players that just want to talk about their day and not disturb the other players in the game. In other words, they are potentially punishing the majority to try and curb cheating perpetrated by a minority of players, that will just switch over to skype or cell phones anyway.

I am a big fan of party chatting with my friends over Xbox Live, so I will be pretty disappointed if this turns out to be true (which is looking pretty likely). Party Chat ( think party lines on the telephone from the 1980's) has changed Xbox Live in a very fundamental way by cutting out a lot of the juvenile trash talking and racial slurs that used to fly like grains of rice at a wedding in both the pre-game lobby, and when playing in-game. It also made it far more convenient to do cross-game chatting with friends, something that could now be impossible with friends that are playing MW2. So as you might imagine, Xbox gamers are a trifle upset about this decision. As are PC gamers, but for different reasons.

A couple of weeks ago, Infinity Ward's community manager, Robert Bowling announced that the PC version of MW2 would not feature support for dedicated severs, a feature that PC gamers have taken for granted for over a decade. Instead, Infinity Ward will be launching IWNet and with it, it's own form of a console style match making service. The reasoning behind the decision was simple, to make MW2 more accessible to casual players that just want to click a button and be placed into a good game with players of a similar skill level, without having to search through a list of servers. And for some folks, IWNet will be a godsend. But for the majority of PC gamers, the removal of dedicated servers means that they cannot run their own mods and clans, something that has become fundamental in the hardcore world of PC shooters. So they started a petition that has garnered over one-hundred-and-seventy-thousand signatures in a little more than two weeks.

And that's not all......

SPOILERS AHEAD

Be warned all ye that continue beyond this point, plot points will be discussed!! The plot of MW2 contains scenes of domestic terrorism. Washington looks like it has been nuked in one of the recent trailers for the game, and it was recently revealed that there would be skippable sequences within the game and a warning about the graphic content up front. One of the skippable sequences involves the player controlling an undercover agent that has infiltrated a terrorist organization as the terrorists attack an airport and kill civilians, in an attempt to illustrate the insane choices people have to make when dealing with evil people. Just wait until Fox News hears about this.

My full thoughts on this last item would take up an entire blog post, so I will close by saying that I'm still looking forward to MW2 just with a far more tempered enthusiasm than I was three weeks ago, and I hope this isn't the beginning of the end for the Call of Duty franchise.