One of the more interesting features to be added into Destiny 2 via its recently launched Warmind DLC is a new type of endgame activity called Escalation Protocols. In theory, Escalation Protocols function as a special sort of outdoor endgame activity in which players fight off increasingly powerful waves of Hive enemies. Sadly, in practice, Escalation Protocols have proved to be a headache not only for players who want to participate in them but for virtually all players who frequent Warmind’s new Hellas Basin outdoor region.
In the eyes of the community, one slight tweak could potentially fix those headaches: Escalation Protocol matchmaking.
At first glance, Escalation Protocols bear some resemblance to past Destiny co-op experiments like Court of Oryx, Prison of Elders, and Archon’s Forge, offering players who prefer the game’s PvE (player vs. environment) gameplay another challenge to test their mettle against. Escalation Protocols can be manually triggered by any player who has finished Warmind’s story campaign, and since they are located in the Hellas Basin outdoor zone, where fireteams are limited to a maximum of three players, their difficulty is theoretically tuned to be overcome by three well-geared players.
Sadly, even the most skilled fireteams have been finding the later waves of the Escalation Protocols (in which enemy power levels nearly crest 400 while players are capped at 385) an insurmountable challenge. Since a single instance of Hellas Basin can hold a maximum of nine players at once, those seeking to defeat an entire Escalation Protocol have turned to unorthodox strategies in order to gather three fireteams in the same instance and thus increase their chances of success. Browse the official Destiny subreddit, and you’ll see a lot of two things: players expressing frustration over how Escalation Protocols are implemented (this is not the first time Bungie has botched the implementation of a core feature), and players calling to Bungie to add in some sort of Escalation Protocol matchmaking.
Bungie has never explicitly said how many players are meant to undertake a single Escalation Protocol, but their presence in Hellas Basin suggests that the closer to nine players there are, the better. Matchmaking would alleviate a lot of the issues that players currently have, but given Bungie’s reluctance in adding matchmaking to older activities like Nightfall Strikes, players might not want to get their hopes up too high. Here’s hoping that, at the very least, Bungie is listening and has some sort of solution in the works.
For more on Destiny 2, be sure to read about the rumored Armsweek event that would offer additional weapon-based challenges for Strike players.