Experiencing the same probles, steam user, after repeatedly trying , eventually logged character in , connection lost after a couple of minutes,expericed as above post.
1:22 still "socket closed’ error
(note, just remembered the servers did log this character out at the update time, normally I shut down beforehand, hope this helps)
1:28 characters loaded and just warped to roid field, just kept re-trying
(1 hour lost, so sad)