Hear is how to massively increase the amount of active players

I did turn it on.

Also I am from South Africa dead battlefields is not an uncommon thing.
But usually their is a server browser that we can use to find a game in Europe.
That is not a thing in this game

This is why reducing the minimum players to 1 is such a good idea.

People can join a game immediately 
and if more join, great
and if more don't join, well aren't we glad we did not sit in the deployment screen for 30 minutes waiting to find out.