Cannot connect to public or my friends Garden ops and Backyard battlegrounds

   I remember when the game was free for a week on Xbox a year ago and since then I've never been able to connect to a friends backyard or join any garden ops publicly. I can play pvp fine and to play with my friends we connect during a match which gets annoying since queues are a thing. Ive hard reset, uninstalled, restarted my router but nothing seems to work. I dont like doing solo things and I really want to mess around with my friends in the backyard or play Garden ops. If someone could please help me out that would be amazing.   Ps: My pvz gw is the same too. After I played gw2 for that free week the original gw acted the same not letting me party up or play garden ops