The public area had many, many concessions to accommodate that decision. I would imagine that some of them likely had networking rammifications.

Haven’t they been pretty explicit about the reason for 3 person patrols?

It’s about the reserved spaces for fire teams. If they allowed 6 person fire teams in zones that allow only 9 people, you’d always be in an instance by yourself due to needed 5 extra reserved spaces.

They could fix that maybe by allowing you to load directly into Escalation Protocol like you could Vault of Glass, but how much work is that? And would that lease to folks only use that method to play it, so you’ll never actually see it happening while just on patrol with randos. And at that point you might as well just make a different mode altogether.

Adding 6 man patrol mode, while cool, would require a pretty hefty reworking of the networking model.

Did you forget that Vault of Glass was in a regular public space with full access to the entire Venus Patrol area?

I don't think "a pretty hefty reworking of the network model" is actually the issue for not allowing 6-man patrols...

Did you listen to their talk about how the seamless matchmaking works? Go listen. It was a GDC talk I think. VoG launching in a patrol zone is different.

They have to save space for people in your fireteam in case they join. So even though you are by youself, you take up 3 'slots'. For a 6 man Patrol, you'd take up 6 slots meaning you would meet fewer people. I think there were 9 total slots. VoG did it because you were entering the Raid, not going patrolling, so it didn't matter if 6 slots were taken up, and everybody already started in a fireteam.

It wouldn't be much fun to only ever meet one person on patrol would it? The game capped at 9 presumably due to technical reasons. But if it didn't limit you, you could go into a zone with 9 people, then everyone could have 2 people join, You'd have 27 people, and the game would break. For a 6 man team, that'd be even worse.

I think it depends on how they handle it.

...there’s a big difference between getting a message asking you to leave the instance so they can get their friends in, versus them just harassing you trying to force you to leave.

If they're nice about it and will allow me to finish my current patrol mission before reinstancing, then I'll have no problem helping them out. If, however, they want to be jerks about it, blocking spawns and killing everything before I get a chance to finish my patrol, I'll happily sit, unplug my controller so they can't rumble it off of my desk, and go do the dishes while they wait.

-Disciple

I think it depends on how they handle it.

I’m going to leave regardless, but there’s a big difference between getting a message asking you to leave the instance so they can get their friends in, versus them just harassing you trying to force you to leave.

It’s a ten second load into a new instance of the sand area, I don’t think politely getting asked to leave should affect anyone’s enjoyment.

Yeah, it's easy to assume everyone online is an ass. But I'd happily jump to a new instance if a group was clearly trying to form. I'm also not against teaching them a lesson in politeness if they're dicks about it. Do you know how long it takes to type out a message about saying please and not spamming on a controller? Long enough to teach a lesson. Heck, I'd probably even offer to invite one of their pals before leaving just to make sure they get the point.