u/quantum_3r453r

Been playing The Division 2 for the past couple of years always solo. The "Free to play" days on xbox a week ago made me appreciate how fun it is to play with others, which I did in the pve dz. So I decided to get a Game Pass and continue to play online, but now I'd like to explore other activities that I never attempted as a solo player, like raids, incursions or higher tier escalations.

I have a bunch of solid builds, but my main issue is that I'm totally new to raids and incursions, so I may need some guidance from other players there in terms of gear and mechanics.

I tried to sign up to discord to join popular servers like gcrock, but my account was locked immediately for some unknown rules violation, despite me having done no activity whatsoever. I raised a support ticket but who knows where that road ends.

I thought I could join a clan, but which one? Any active out there who accept new players on xbox? Or even just team up with anybody who's happy to take on a "newbie" to multiplayer gaming.

Premise: I play on console (Xbox) and I have no subscription to GamePass, so I'm excluded to all the game features that involve multiplayer. I basically play solo all the time.

That said, earlier today I went about my usual run on the pve dz (south this week) to collect a bunch of dz resources, since it's double the reward at the moment. As I got out of the check point I ran into an enemy patrol I almost got one-shot twice, the second time luckily my restore hive kicked in and saved my butt. I was a bit suprised, since generally I dispatch very easily the NPCs in the dark zone as being a solo player the alert level is always at 1.

Then out of a corner pops out (what I thought) another enemy, so I start shooting at the guy but with no effect. Moreover, again to my surprise, the guy doesn't shoot back, and I think.. what the heck? Then it dawns on me, this time to my total disbelief, that I'm actually sharing the server instance with other players, as I also realize that the alert level is set to 3 (which explained the increased NPCs difficulty).

To the guy I was shooting at: sorry mate, I'm not used to see other "good guys" and initially I didn't know what to make of you.

Ultimately I ended up spending a couple of hours in the dz and extracted stuff joining in someone else's extraction a few times. Also called an extraction myself and saw three players coming in, which made getting rid of the hunter a joke. I have to say I quite enjoyed this new "dimension" of the game.

However, and thank you if you managed to read up until now, my question is:

How is that possible? Did that happen to anyone else? Is that a glitch or did I miss some Microsoft/Massive announcement that would (temporarily) allow multiplayer features for free to non subscribers?

[XB1] looking for clan or group of players

Wait, what???