Okay so the factory reset seemed to work. I really don't know what happened to my laptop. All I can think of was the windows 8.1 update was giving me major compatibility issues or something. Anyways, thanks for your effort and help Ottk3.

Yeah I noticed steam was acting up yesterday but the problem started before that even happened. I did verify and it said it was fine. I also reinstalled the game just to make sure and still nothing. My computer did start acting up really badly all the sudden so I actually ended up having to do a factory reset. Maybe some windows files got corrupt. Just trying to get everything set up and we'll see how it works.

No, my character does not. And it does it even before the loading screen. I only get to that by joining a friend or hitting play. But in the change server option nothing is there and no loading happens when I freeze in there.