Setting up for a private party.

is it possible your friends settings are set to offline or away, this would cause for you to see them as offline??



Even if you are partied up or in a private chat they will appear offline if they want they profile to do so

No you cannot. You can have your party options set to public where anyone could join you like people who recently played with you and friends, then set up a horde private match.

I am going to guess you and your son were playing Minecraft. Beside using the headset to set up a private party to talk, you could use text messages to set an exact spot to meet at in the game world.

I feel the entire problem with party chat is the default settings. When somebody starts a party, it is automatically private. Most people don't even pay attention to that because they are already talking to their friends. Most people are not starting parties
for privacy reasons. Most people start them because its easier to connect with their friends. I bet if the party system was set up with the option for public or private in game chat when you create the party, you would hear many more people talking in games
and games besides Halo, Gears and COD would be able to establish communities instead of being dead in a month or two because you can't meet really meet somebody already in a party.

Party Chat doesn't default to private (which is really an "invite only" setting). The default is that anyone on your FL, or friends of friends, can jump in. You have to manually set parties to invite only.