Every game experiences problems at launch, hopefully by the actual release day everything will be running smoothly.
I've been receiving the same Error 1017 for the past 3 hours now, I admit it is frustrating but what can you do. People are going to choose to AFK to avoid this very problem and there are currently no measures in place to prevent people from actually doing so.
This problem will probably only be temporary and SE will probably learn from their mistakes and actually increase server population throughout the EU/NA datacenters to prevent this from re-occuring in the future.