Steve Fenton

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Tuesday, 17th August 2010

I play a lot of online games on X-Box Live and it provides me with hours of fun. The only problem is that quite often the chat-channel is flooded with people who think it is a genius idea to play music down their headset, breathe suspiciously heavily or generally provide high levels of annoyance.

The traditional solution to this problem is to "party up" whenever you play, and with the chat channel set to "party chat" you don't hear any of the trash talking or invites to "Mike Myers" lobbies. This solution doesn't work, though, for Modern Warfare 2 - as party-chat is disabled for all the good game modes. There are many theories, most of which are wrong, about why this is, but it caused many people to request that party-chat was brought back.

For some time, I played under the BBPC clan tag (Bring Back Party Chat), but I have now found a permanent fix, using X-Box Live privacy settings. If you are fed up with hearing the constant cries of "no that's what you are, what am I?.." from people who live half-way around the world, here is my solution. The only down side to this is that you will miss out on meeting some cool random people, which I did used to enjoy - but listening to all the rubbish was too high a price!

There are six steps to this fake version of party chat, and here they are...

From the "My Xbox" group, select "Profile"

Select the "Edit Profile" option.

Select the "Privacy Settings" option.

Select the "Voice and Text" option. Your current setting is probably the default, "Everyone".

Select "Friends Only".

Your new setting is now shown. When you go online, you will only hear the selected people lucky enough to call themselves friends, and only your friends can hear you.