How to bring 9 players into Destiny 2: Warmind’s Escalation Protocol

Escalation Protocol is one of the more exciting additions in Destiny 2: Warmind. It asks players to jump into a social space and take on an extremely difficult, wave-based challenge. That would normally be great, but players still can’t match into social spaces with more than two friends, a combined total of three players.

However, the social spaces can all hold nine, meaning that you have to hope for six other players that you can’t really coordinate with. Well, crafty Destiny 2 players have already found a workaround for this frustrating limitation.

If you have nine friendly players (or just more than three), you can technically get into the same social space to do Escalation Protocol together. The process isn’t exactly player-friendly though.

There are a few steps required to getting this working:

1. Make sure you’re not in a fireteam and have a way to communicate with your friends
2. Launch into the same Mars drop zone around the same time
3. If you don’t see any of your friends, fast travel to the other Mars landing zone and then back
4. Repeat step three until you end up in an drop zone with someone you know
5. Once at least two of you are together, stay there until a third friend finds their way to you
6. Once you have two friends in the same area, have each player invite two more friends to join a fireteam. Basically, you’re creating three separate fireteams of people you know, totaling up to nine players
7. Once you’re all together, be sure to stay in the same landing zone area so you don’t get instanced out of your big party
8. You can now play as a group of up to nine players for as long as you want

This is the very serious, not at all joking, only way that you can get the full amount of players into this new activity. Escalation Protocol itself is very difficult and has a very high power level required to realistically compete. So while a group of nine is much better than randoms, it’s by no means a guaranteed win.

For a detailed look at how to get into these fireteam groups, check out Destiny YouTuber xHoundishx’s helpful tutorial.

For a full look at what a nine-player Escalation Protocol looks like, check out Destiny YouTuber Datto’s playthrough.