Last night was great, was up with Valor and ObiWan, cranking away on tough competition when Local sent us a party invite. See, typically when we've got a party going, folks that want to join later won't have the option to "Join Party" for whatever reason and only see the option to "Invite to Party". When one of us gets the invite, we send the latecomer an invite and they join our party and all is well.
But not last night. I got Local's message and sent him an invite and he never joined. He sent me a few more invites and I sent my counter invites but no luck.
ObiWan left and only Valor and I were in the party so I told Valor to leave our party and try to join Local on one of his invites but when he hit the accept invite button, nothing happened. I told Valor I'd bail on our party and send him an invite once I'd joined Local, and off I went.
I left my party and tried accepting one of Local's invites and... nothing happened. I tried again, no joy. I sent Local an invite to my party and when he hit the join button, nothing happened. Great. We tried a bunch more times with no luck.
I went back to my friends list and looked at Valor's profile and he had the "Join Party" option active, so I hit the button and popped right into his party. When Local tried the same thing, nothing happened.
Here's my theory. I think when our party originally started earlier in the night, all was well. Something happened somewhere that messed up the system and wouldn't allow folks to join on invites or in any other way. I think since our party started before whatever happened and was held open by Valor, we may have been one of a few remaining parties in the xBox One universe.
In any event, that whole thing sucked. BF4 without parties and chat is a nightmare.
There's a patch that's supposed to be coming out for the xBox One very soon that's supposed to overhaul the whole party/chat scheme and I hunch some server side update took place to accommodate those changes and that change broke the current scheme.
From my point of view, no chat, no battlefield.