I can comfirm to you this issue is 3 months in the making and it has only grown to effect more players than originally. I have dated cases with EA Help. Also, yes your region may have a higher number of players and in mine its often hard to get 16 players for Breakthrough with crossplay on. However if I use a vpn to search matches on the opposite US coast, I can get matches with no bots at all. But the main issue has nothing to do with crossplay. Even off, at 2 minutes searching the game will load me into a match where I am the only one and wait for others. However it doesnt get to this point anymore cause once the screen goes black after saying the map, we dont get into the big map and mode display. So switching between the two hasnt confirmed whether you are resolving the problem by having crossplay on, youre just having more luck than most retrying and landing a few matches after black screen and crossplay on/off is mostly coincidental. I say that because 4 weeks ago I could play one match and be fine as long as I stayed and didnt return to menu for another or take a break. If I did the issue persisted for hours until roughly 7-8pm at night consistently for about a week. I have tested dozens of variables and theres another post marked as "solved" (which of course it isnt) that shows all the testing I had done, including using 2 other accounts where 2 of 3 would have the bug and 1 did not until this last week, all on the same device and settings, network etc.