In addition, the greater share of the CoH files are actually on your hard drive, and mine. Someone like Posi could fix up the rest pretty dang quick if needed. And our characters are safe thanks to Titan's Archiver.
^^ That. Demorecords run off the client, they aren't straight up video files. All of the scenery of Paragon City is
in the client. The client has just been trained not to use that information unless a server is telling it how to populate it.
Technically speaking they could delete all of our characters and anyone who hadn't used the Sentinel+ tool would lose their characters forever. It's also still
possible (although not likely) that they've deleted the character data and if/when the servers come back online they can't properly interpret the data in the Sentinel+ backup files, or some other technical error happens. But the City, in its entirety, is still sitting safely and soundly on my hard drive, and I can even make the client access pretty much any part of it I want. I just can't do that in an interactive manner without a server to connect to.
Would you really care if they lost your account data so long as they got the game running again?
I'd level up from 1-50 on any of the characters I had.
I'd be sad that I lost my badges. I'd be kinda irate if I had to re-purchase Titan Weapons, Dark Control, and Dark Assault. But I'd still re-roll Ivy in Chains and Kate Wraith. I can't explain it, but I owe those two characters enough to make them real again, in whatever sense they can be.