The arena is more competitive than ever. Use defensive tactics, save your last arena go to hit someone then let the timer burn down. This will stop people hitting you in the last 5 mins. Save all your attacks for the last hour to minimise sniping someone else and finding an enemy with a memory. Also spend a while aggressively staying as high ranked as possible, the higher you are the less people can hit you. Also save 50 crystals for a strategic arena refresh.
Contact people on forum, look up their alliance using swgoh etc, then look on recruitment pages and PvP for people in their alliance and send them a forum message with your discord account etc.