The issues on the North American and European PC/Mac megaservers have been resolved at this time. If you continue to experience difficulties at login, please restart your client. Thank you for your patience!
Yes, the PTS process is rather pro-forma and useless for the most part.
At some point we will probably also get the traditional post-patch "We know we can do better with communicating with the players and we will try to do better moving forward" post from the devs and then... the exact same thing happens all over again.
We will probably be having the same conversation at this time in another patch cycle.