Here's a little trick that would help the load on the lobby server. Add preference options in the configuration to only query "NA/EU" and/or "JP" data centers for characters. Personally I would use only the NA/EU. Right now, every time I try access the game, I cause a hit on the JP database as well, while I would be more than willing to leaving the precious CPU and network resource for someone who actually want to check these servers.

Of course this would not help the game servers themselves, but would reduce the amount of timeout we get when trying to retrieve character and as a result would probably help with the massive amount of queries I suspect that server receive for we keep clicking start while trying to log in.