I thought with the recent patch there was improvements to the matchmaking. From our experience today its worse than ever. Our crew sat waiting for 20 minutes over lunch for the arena to launch. There was 5 teams present between 2-4 per crew. I know its not 'ideal' but waiting for full crews is far worse than just having 3 active ships.
On our second match I decided to leave my closed crew and server hop just to see what would happen. The arena instance I joined was in the same predicament. At least 5 crews represented with 2-4 per crew (except me I was a single crew)
After another 15ish minutes my crew launched, so I just re-joined them.
This matchmaking experience is really terrible and greatly detracts from the Arena. I wish the Arena server would just pull from ALL available participants regardless of which 'instance' you belong to. The arena 'ready room' should just function as a social space instead of a requirement to launch the game.
