Extremely long load times, upwards of 90 seconds or more

Hey there all. I just downloaded the game for the free weekend and I'm having trouble with INSANE load times. Just booting up the game, the load screen to get to the login screen is 90-120 seconds, many zones I enter are 1 minute or more, portaling back to Clearfell Encampment from Mud Burrow after defeating the Devourer took THREE AND A HALF MINUTES. Even opening the world map screen requires a load, and closing the map gives me a black screen with ANOTHER load screen.
After searching, I've seen multiple threads here in the Bug Reports forum talking about this since last year, such as this and this with people complaining about the same issue. My PC is under the minimum processor specs, as you can see:

Core i5-6500 CPU
Geforce 1070 8GB GPU
16 GB DDR4 RAM
500GB SSD (non-NVME)

but the reports of other users with FAR more powerful machines than me have been having the same issue for months. Please take a look at this GGG! Also, if anyone has a solution (other than "get a new computer lol") I would appreciate it.

I am experiencing the same issue, loading into some zones is taking multiple minutes.

Should I tell you something even funnier, this is exactly what it looks like when I enter

https://hizliresim.com/hjdrfzg

same

Yes, this is only getting worse every patch. screws up the rythm as well, by the time I load the new zone i already forget why i'm there in the first place, and if I enter the wrong zone then it's almost 5 minutes to get on the right track, once I get to maps it's a lot better, but 2 minutes loading screens with 0 MTX equiped is just stupid.

A quick addition to this:
After playing for a couple of hours, I noticed the map screen/gameplay screen load times got a lot shorter, if not eliminated. Also, after a few hours, returning to instances of a zone I've already been to has a much shorter load time.
No matter how many times I've been to Clearfell Encampment though, it's still just about 3 minutes.

Trying different server areas fixed this for my husband. Some made it much worse though, so you gotta just keep trying random ones. Hopefully that will help! i know how frustrating it can be to wait so long (: