yay, tacos!

For the most part, I much prefer playing single player video games. I hate having to coordinate play times with my friends, and playing with strangers just isn’t as much fun. That said, I do love a good online game of Fat Princess, Blur or Transformers: War for Cybertron. Aside from cheaters – there is one thing that ruins these games though: annoying people (typically kids) on chat. There’s always some dipshit literally just screaming into the mic or making retarded mouth noises. I can’t stand it.

Of course, when I play with my friends, I like to be able to chat with them – but I don’t want to hear xXiPwNeDyOuXx screaming at his mother that he wants his juice.

Until now, the only solution I could find was to manually go and mute everyone manually – but that’s a stop-gap solution. As soon as you change matches or a new jackass gets on, you have to go and re-mute everyone all over again. Unfortunately, there is no way to “mute all” on the fly, but here is the next best solution.

Settings -> Profile -> Edit Profile -> Privacy Settings -> Voice & Text

Here, you have three options:

Everyone

Let anyone on Xbox LIVE communicate with you using voice and chat.

Friends Only

Let only your friends communicate with you

Blocked

Prevent all communication. You’ll still receive system messages and friend requests.

Chances are that you’re like me – and you have Everyone selected. Go ahead and change this to Friends Only or Blocked based on your preference. If you have a problem with screaming children on XBL and you already had Friends Only or Blocked selected, then you need to cull your friends list or tell the voices in your head to pipe down.

The annoying part about this method is that you have to sign out to edit your profile, so you can’t really do this in the middle of a match. Still, that’s a small price to pay to have a nice and quiet game. I’ve now got mine set to Friends Only so that I can chat with and hear my friends, but all non-friends are completely muted automatically.

Does anyone have a better way to do this?

Open up the Edit Profile menu

Navigate to the Privacy Settings for your profile

Choose your preferred setting in the Voice & Text Settings