Big problems loading today, Velious related or July 24th patch related?

[Zuranthium]

I had a ton of problems with the game today, it took me 15-20 attempts to be able to log in every time I tried; after trying to go the server select screen it would simply be blank with no servers to select. The game was also freezing rather frequently when trying to zone, so I would have to close it out and then go do the whole dance with spending a lot time trying to even get to the server select screen each time.

I had no problems with the game on Thursday or Friday, although strangely I had NOT yet even downloaded the July 24th patch (I just came back to the game on Thursday and had forgot to look and see if there was a new patch before trying to load the game). Usually it says "you have spell files missing" when you get to the character select screen if your game patch is outdated, but that didn't happen on Thursday or Friday even though I hadn't yet downloaded and extracted the patch. The "you have spell files missing" issue only started happening today (Saturday), at which point I went and downloaded and extracted the new patch. However, installing the patch didn't solve the log-in issue to the server select screen at all. I restarted my computer and everything as well.