This has been the discussion on the thread about the system update in general, but I think this deserves its own thread - if you use PSN party chat frequently enough with your friends, chances are the current update has been incredibly frustrating, even when it is working (which it currently is not)
Before FW 8.00, you could make parties whenever. What I can tell, from both my own experiences as well as reading others' reactions to the update, is that folks were accustomed to just making a party, and if they had a friend group that they regularly played with, just joining whoever's party was made first. You could have it private, so anyone that joined wouldn't be disturbed, and if you were playing something that required communication like Destiny 2, or FFXIV, you could just invite a person to the party, and once it was disbanded you'd be good.
Now you're forced to use parties tied to message groups. This was already an option, where you could have text chats with friends through PSN that you could also access on your phone, and you could join a party through the message group. It's a nice feature, and my group used it every now and then, but we didn't want to have to invite everyone that wanted to join our party to our "IRL Friends Group", and so we would normally just use the traditional parties. Now it's the only option, though, and while we still can control who joins our parties - it's much more complicated, it's not nearly as conducive for co-op with randos, and overall it's messy as hell. For example - if we wanted to do Destiny 2 raids with a group of randos on PS4, now we'd have to make an entirely separate message group for it, invite them, and then delete the message group once we were done. Before, literally all we had to do was invite them to a party, and that was it.
I don't know how on earth this got past the planning stage, because the removal of the standard Public/Private party system is so incredibly dumb. Revert the system, Sony!
Before FW 8.00, you could make parties whenever. What I can tell, from both my own experiences as well as reading others' reactions to the update, is that folks were accustomed to just making a party, and if they had a friend group that they regularly played with, just joining whoever's party was made first. You could have it private, so anyone that joined wouldn't be disturbed, and if you were playing something that required communication like Destiny 2, or FFXIV, you could just invite a person to the party, and once it was disbanded you'd be good.
Now you're forced to use parties tied to message groups. This was already an option, where you could have text chats with friends through PSN that you could also access on your phone, and you could join a party through the message group. It's a nice feature, and my group used it every now and then, but we didn't want to have to invite everyone that wanted to join our party to our "IRL Friends Group", and so we would normally just use the traditional parties. Now it's the only option, though, and while we still can control who joins our parties - it's much more complicated, it's not nearly as conducive for co-op with randos, and overall it's messy as hell. For example - if we wanted to do Destiny 2 raids with a group of randos on PS4, now we'd have to make an entirely separate message group for it, invite them, and then delete the message group once we were done. Before, literally all we had to do was invite them to a party, and that was it.
I don't know how on earth this got past the planning stage, because the removal of the standard Public/Private party system is so incredibly dumb. Revert the system, Sony!
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