Can confirm a similar issue. Multiplayer Explorer Mode allowed me to invite three friends in and each create characters, but on loading in to the game itself two people were essentially kicked out from the game as they were stuck on the loading screen. Tried several times to get it working, ensuring that we did not use custom tags and were all a different race as per other suggestions. Also, the portraits get messed up - as a human my friends received the default dwarf portrait and name from the opposite gender as originally created. This issue did not come up in Classic Mode, however.
