I think it goes without saying that logging into this game is a mess. Myself, along with many other players it seems, are having trouble getting past the region select screen or the character select screen without the game freezing or crashing.
With that being said, let me suggest something. I'm no programmer or anything, so if I'm incorrect in stating these points, go ahead and let me know, or just dismiss this. But here's the way I see things:
Right now, the process to load the game is to first, launch it. Then, pick your region. Then pick your character and type in your PIC. So first, by clicking the launcher to start the game, you're telling Nexon's servers "okay, boot the game up, and load this data (intro graphics, V trailer, region select)." Then, when you pick your region, you're telling the servers "okay, load from this particular server" whichever one it is.
This is my suggestion. What if we had two separate options when we first launch the game? For example, have two different buttons that say "Launch North America" or "Launch Europe." The intro graphics and the trailers would still play just the same, but it would make the region select screen within the game completely unnecessary, and quite frankly I believe that's where a lot of these login issues are coming from. It would also tell Nexon's servers what data to load right away, eliminating a step in the login process.
There's probably some unknown factor (whether it be something that's beyond my basic understanding of programming or some secret way that Nexon runs things) that wouldn't make this possible, but I'm just throwing it out there.
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The problem is that, a while back, Nexon changed the client startup to be (or seem) faster.
I don't know if you've been playing long enough to remember this, but in the past, the client would load everything it needs before letting you input (or select) anything. As the client size increased to 9GB, we would sit there for a long long time (5 minutes was not unusual) looking at a loading screen with a bouncing mushroom on it, before the login screen appeared.
Then they changed it so the loading happens in the background. The client loads the bare minimum it needs in order to display the login screen (for GameLauncher) and server/channel selection, and shows them to us as soon as possible. While we type and click, more data is loaded. We see our characters and can pick one and enter the PIC, but then, if we are quick, we need to wait for the client to finish loading so it can run the full game. (While this is happening, some buttons on the character-select screen are grayed-out).
Then they added an intro video, to take up the time and hopefully finish loading before the user is done logging in.
And now they added the region select.
Somewhere along the way, something in their background loading process broke, and now if you don't do certain steps of the login process at the right time, your game crashes. The region select itself is not at fault, nor is the video. They just happen to coincide with the time it takes the loading process to crash, for many computers. If you reverse the order, you'll still crash, just at a different point.
What Nexon needs to do is look again at that background loading thing, and make sure that it is robust enough to get the client fully loaded and running, regardless of how fast the hardware is or how patient the user is.
I've been playing since 2008, I remember having to wait upwards of 10 minutes for the game to finish booting up before being able to log in. So yes I understand that part. I remember being so ecstatic whenever they announced how the new loading process would be much faster and everything, and for a while it seemed okay.
I guess the part that I didn't understand was why it crashed, my thinking was if you cut the work load that the game/servers have to make to start the game up, it would at least help a little. But as I said in my original post I'm no programmer, so my theories might be completely invalid lol