So I’ve seen a lot of posts about escalation protocol lately. Mainly about players being toxic, the player requirement being inconvenient (to put it kindly), and the whole thing just being a general pain in the ass. It all boils down to one question: What were they thinking when they put a 9 player activity in an area you can only enter with 3 people? Well the answer is quite simple. They wanted fireteams of 3 to meet other random groups of 3 and come together in the ultimate test of community teamwork. However, this doesn’t work for several reasons. First of all, the game does not have enough players. I like this game, but the sad truth is that there just aren’t enough players to properly populate all of the servers. Everyone is just spread thin so that there are only a handful of people in each patrol, and the fact that there is no priority in matching fireteams with other fireteams in patrol, you get maybe one full fireteam and a couple of randoms. A solution to this could be some sort of matchmaking system that only lets you queue with 3 people, but matches up teams of 9. This would still leave the other issues though, such as the rampant toxicity and elitism that rivals the Crota’s End days of D1. Or the inconvenience of trying to get a group of people together and then a bunch of randoms who have no interest in doing it showing up because they need to talk to Ana or something. It’s just a no win situation. It was a good idea that just doesn’t work with this community. Edit: Another solution to the problems would be to simply move the activity to a different area. Somewhere like Archon’s Forge was in, where it was still in patrol, but the only people that went there were the ones that were actually trying to participate. Or maybe have an option on your director that you can toggle EP on or off, then have sessions where it’s disabled if you don’t want to spawn in to a server with a bunch of people trying to get their group together.