Sorry to hear you're all suffering this much with the queues! I was about to tell you that there is no afk kick on the character select screen, but I'm told that has changed today. So unfortunately there is no easy solution. All you can do is start up the game a few hours before you intend to play. Perhaps get someone to start it for you before you get home.
Once you're in game, you're able to afk for up to 45 minutes before you get kicked. Players than get disconnected though are put into a priority list, so you should be able to get straight back in if your game crashes. Patrons do have a priority queue, which is about three times faster than the general queue as far as I can tell.
@Phinix, those servers didn't even exist when we started last friday. When headstart began there was only 4 servers.
It really is a bit rough right now, but yeah hopefully the hype will die down soon and the queues will go by next week. It's unpleasant now, but this is probably the right move for Trion to make. In both KR and RU the game suffered very badly due to too many servers at launch. After the initial popularity spike you're left with half empty servers, which in a big issue in this game, since a lot of the end game is dependent on a decent server population. Thanks to the open world housing system, server squashes are not pretty here either.
Hope you guys make it through soon!