Failed to Connect to Instance

Has happened about 10 or more times in the past 15 minutes...

It's almost impossible to stay in a group for more than 20 minutes before I get DC'd from this error...

Many sad faces.

Started playing on January 31. Didn't have any problems until the last three or four days or so. Seems like it has only gotten worse in that time.

Here's what I can tell the devs. "Failed to connect to instance" always happened at transition points (until last night; I'll get to that). What I DID find out, however, was it seemed like instances were getting corrupted or something. Why do I say that? Because I found if I tried going through a transition point more than once and I crashed out to the login screen, if I logged in and instead of clicking on the transition point held the "Ctrl" key and created a new instance, my problem was solved!

So I've been taking that approach when dealing with these connection issues. But last night was infuriating as when I got to Solaris Temple Level 3, I dropped a portal and entered it to go back to town, only to be dropped. This was the first I had "failed to connect to instance" via a portal. And since it was a portal, the creating of a new instance of town isn't an option (I assume). So that trick won't work.

I've looked in other threads, and it seems the devs haven't really addressed this in full. Is the problem a bug, or is it related to high-traffic connection issues? And WHY did creating a new instance resolve my problems if its claimed to only be a high-traffic connection issue? By creating a new instance to solve the problem, it sounds more like a bug in the game, but what do I know?

Devs?

Edit: By the way, I've been doing this behind a VPN from the beginning, so that stickied "Using a VPN to avoid connection issues" thread doesn't seem to be relevant to my problem.

Started getting lots of these since the patch it seems (I might be wrong though, started playing just 5-6 days ago). It cost me the current race too. It happens often when zoning into Mud Flats for the first time, for example.