Indeed, for me it pretty much started yesterday. I theorize that when the character server go down even for a few secs, the game servers that were connected to it lose that connection and need to be restarted to get it back (which suck really). Otherwise, well, if this is really only a matter of waiting.... with the 15min ish delay before you timeout and end up with no gear and stuff. thats the 9th try in a row to join a server in my case, (8 timed out, 1 to come), so im starting to strongly doubt its even possible to get past that point by waiting. What i find sort off interesting, is that while there was just about as many people friday, i did not see those issues, and that even when i tried to play during a much lower player count time (there was actually less than 200 players on different servers), i still couldnt get past the waiting except on servers freshly restarted.