Ingame party does not work on community servers

I was in a 2 man party as the host and tried to join a community server listed under the "browse servers", but I was the only one to join while the other party member stayed in the main menu

This is actually pretty crippling. You can't play with friends anymore through the party system.
In my region the NWI official servers are not active and finding a game the old way puts you in a foreign server at 200 ping.