I have the same problem, I did the same as you, even thought about reinstalling windows...
After about 2 hours of trying and trying I finally made it into a random server on which i created a new character but I still can't access the server i was playing before, it gets stuck on "Waiting for server...".
If i recall correctly, I remember having that kind of problem around September 2014, when i bought the game. Though I don't know how it got fixed.
The admin of the server I play on told me he also had some problems loading in the server yesterday, when the patch went out.
I am not sure what is causing this, I've opened ports, re-downloaded the game and also cleared the cache by deleting the "deamon" folder and using the steam options to verify the game after.
I hope you guys can do something about this, for infos I got an AMD processor, an AMD GPU and windows 8.1 64 bits in french.
Oh... One last thing, after applying the patch yesterday I opened the game and connected to the server, successfully. While i was in the game I changed my video settings to almost max everywhere... to see further away because i noticed i couldn't see saplings from afar.
Now today when i relaunched the game and tried to connect to the same server it didn't work.
A friend told me there was known issues with high video settings, but I guess it was too late since I've already changed them when I heard about that. I've tried putting back my video settings to low today and without success, the server still won't load no matter high or low video settings.
I tried making another character on the server but in vain, still nothing.
Anyway, good luck with that. I guess that for now I'll have to play another game.
Thank you for your time and keep up the good work!
Your's,
WX