Ok, so it turns out that there's a bug with how online games handle the "Keep changes, but don't save" option for settings which is preventing the Guest account from being able to use icon passing by default. To be honest, you probably won't see a fix for this...not because we don't want to, but because there's an easy workaround for it which is to just buy the Icon Passing cheat from the Blitz Store and then have the Guest player enter in the code before each co-op game.
From the EA forums... not really what i wanted to hear, but I guess we'll have to live with it.