FYI, for new servers, you can climb it with a friend of similar power before the arena became Xserver by abusing the win-in-a-row bonus point system.

That said, the player "in the middle" who did not get the ez six path early and whose arena is already Xserver are stuck...

Well, i can consistently match with one of my groupmate.

the one thing I found, however, is that we have a hard time matching up if we click the match *on as little as more than 5 seconds apart. It either doesn't match us at all (after 10 min) or do so only have 1-3 min have passed. We had to resort to external chat to ensure the timing is exact.

thou in our case, our server is already Xserver and we are only testing it as a proof of concept. So thing might work differently (we are also both 60k+ lv 90s. Knowing that sage&masuri matches LEVEL before power, it is possible that the same goes for arena. is you and your mate the same level?)