But xbox live gold is actually worth paying for.

Now if only they made friend only chat something you could configure on your xbox instead of on xbox.com, and if it changed instantly instead of taking up to 4 hours, that wouldn't be so bad.

What if you don't want to add that friend though? And if party chat was enabled, you wouldn't have to do that. The point is, removing party chat is simply a huge inconvenience. It does not solve any issues of cheating (which I never had a problem with). And if cheating was the issue, there's already a system in place to report cheaters.

My replies aren't showing for some reason...No, others can not hear you when you are set to chat with friends only. Game parties getting split up was very common in MW1 and still is in MW2. It could be NAT settings, but I can't change my friends' settings. And even when it doesn't work, if you keep trying it eventually does. But it's quite common to hear people say "back out" in the game chat because they get split up.

I don't want to play Domination, I want to play Team Deathmatch. I shouldn't have to play Domination mode as well just because I want to be able to talk to my party when not everyone makes it into the match.

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?

That's fine and dandy, but let's say you have a friend that invites one of their friends to the game. Then you can't hear that person because they are not on your friends list. So now your friend is talking to a bunch of people that can't hear each other.

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?

My preferred gaming attire is game-branded robes and slippers, so this works out perfectly.

LOL at "even the manufacturers have put in warnings within the game telling people how they can skip particular scenes."

So basically the cutscenes have the standard "Press A to skip".