90% of the cases when you get failed to connect to map server message there's nothing you can do in order to save it. An option is in fact to remove the maps and then connect with the character but this rarely works. Trying to connect with the character from another computer without the maps installed works slightly more often but the majority of the times you will still face the message, over, and over.
It's pretty much because the map process gets stuck on the server itself because of failed initializing/launch. and some maps do get this slightly more often than others. From what I've heard and seen this is a game issue since when a map do get stuck and users get "failed to connect to map server" the process is not even found on the server, hence why a forced restart is needed. For some reason the game fails to launch the map at times, and I'm not sure there's anything in the game that tries to recover this or checks if the map is actually working after launch and instead gets stuck there.
Why my maps seem to get stuck more I'm not certain about honestly, cause just SundownValley is the only map that is overloaded with objects, the rest are actually not too bad and keep around the same amount like flourite or possible even bonfire does and they do stay up for the majority of the time. But, there's still been maps like ficho, cape, last cave etc, that has gotten stuck in the past.
I do not know everything when it comes to this or how to game works, but I get the feeling that my map pack get more attention when it comes to this issue because people walk in and out of the maps quite a lot and leave many of the maps without any users in it for some time, when another user comes to run past a map or just wants to visit the game must launch the map process on the server again, and the more times the map launches, the higher is the risk of a "failed to connect to map server" message.
The thing with official maps is that these map processes stay alive all the time throughout the day pretty much, never does that maps turn completely empty and therefore the map process do not need to restart/start as soon as a member enters = less chance of facing the "failed to connect". This is just a theory honestly though, but we're not really able to just restart the map as it seems since the maps that get stuck like these are not even found, which points this towards being a game issue as far as I'm concerned. I can always be wrong though.
No character is ever lost though, it will work after the server had a full restart and all these maps will get a new chance to launch properly. The only thing I feel get effected by the amount of items is the "Bad token" message possibly.
To the issue at hand though, all you can do is as mentioned above to wait it out.
