I and most likely a lot of other players are experiencing the exact same problems as you are with server pings being in the hundreds or 9999 after booting up the game, I know that I am not alone because I have asked on servers that I play on, those who answered said they experience the same.
My clan mate and I experimented with it and got different results, but generally he also often had the same problems.
I don’t see this as a problem on the user end or with distance to server simply because if it was then why was it rarely ever a problem before?
I am 99.99% convinced that the problem is either the game itself, Funcom launcher or Gportal 
However as others have suggested, you can either wait it out because for some reason the ping usually get below 100 with some minutes after a few retries, or you can use direct connect since you are on pc 
Btw a big thank you to the @Smoketreader and @Kikigirl for providing an explanation and a working solution
EDIT:
I am not really sure that making loads of zendessk tickets on a problem like this is the best solution since it is a known problem that affects many players, but it is what community managers recommend before closing a thread 