Lack of persistent servers is killing smaller regions

Same here in Oceania.

I believe Vince said that they were looking at persistent servers in smaller markets - let's hope  EA honours his vision. 

Hi, I agree. What we need now is a server browser and a rental server program like before.

Make a server in your region. Anyone can easily make a verified-mode server with very little effort. You will probably see that the problem is that no one plays it, and you just sit in queue waiting for people to join your server. Until you convince people in your area that your community server is persistent, and is the thing you say you guys want, what you want is not the thing you utilize. I don't know what the solution is that is necessary to change habit.

The thing that you say you want, already exists. You act like it should be EA's job to force people into your server, when everyone chooses to matchmake instead. It's a choice. It's a habit. It's not EA's job to force people into the persistent servers you (collectively) choose not to use in your region.

I think the OP was referring to persistent servers in matchmaking, not Portal. In larger markets there are persistent servers, so that matchmaking rolls players over to the next map on the same server. In smaller markets, this does not happen. Matchmaking simply spins up a number of servers, and players from the previous map are redistributed.

Vince was aware of this issue, and mentioned the need for persistent servers in smaller markets as well.

If I need to convince people to join a persistent server in portal because it is difficult to find and hasn't really been advertised as a possibility it is 100% Dice's responsibility to fix it. The issue is that when matchmaking puts you into a server that server should automatically be:

1. Persistent
2. Directly accessible to players through normal matchmaking.
3. Once initiated be listed in Portal for others to find at will.
4. Be clearly defined and advertised by the main menu and UI.

None of this currently exists, and I'm tired of having to play with bots when there's plenty of active players in my region that just happen to get flung across to different servers every game.

This is EA's job... Not mine.

Hopefully they follow through with this. It would be a big improvement to the gameplay experience. 

It’s been a month since the OP, but I thought it would be good coming back to this now: with the shrinking player base, this is becoming a critical issue. I’m in the Middle East, and over the past week, it has been difficult to find matches that are not simply filled with bots. And with netcode being what it is, being randomly thrown on EU servers does not provide a solution (I don’t just die around corners, I fairly regularly kill people around corners as well. And that barely feels better). 

Quitting and asking to be matched again repeatedly shows me that outside of peak hour, there’s maybe 3-4 transient servers with 4 to 10 players each. If those people were given a chance to meet on a single server, we’d have a proper game. But then when we do, every one gets split up at the end of the match anyways. 

The current system was devised to ensure player retention through minimizing wait times. Clearly it hasn’t worked, player retention has been catastrophic (who would have thought match quality mattered more than 30 seconds of wait times??). To DICE: you need to change tack. That gambit has failed, it is high time to change tactic and salvage what can be salvaged by improving the player experience for those that remain, and for whom the current matchmaking is utterly failing to deliver a good game experience. 

As time goes by since the game's release, the number of players on PS5 Asian servers has dwindled. Long matchmaking times and the prevalence of bots have become the biggest issues for players still active in the game. I love this game, but the increasing number of bots is affecting my game experience. The officials need to urgently find a solution to this problem.

It’s not only important for smaller regions but also for the EU, US, and other bigger regions. Sometimes matches are so well-balanced that you want to play more with and against the same teams or players—or it’s just plain fun. That’s how I met a lot of my friends back in the day in BF3 and BF4, by doing 'jeep stuff' with randos; it was hella fun.

Persistent servers build communities and rivalries!

Again, you’re confusing community servers with persistent servers, not the same thing.