Long time lurker, first time poster.
All kidding aside, the return of our home has been something I've thought about almost everyday since the shutdown. I know this subject has been brought up many times, and it seems to have died off a bit over the last day but I felt I needed to say this, if only to get it off my chest if nothing else.
I'm not sure all of us would be able to get ALL of our character back, even if the new team is able to get the data.
I say this because, well, how many servers are we going to have under the new team? Are we going to be allowed to have a max of 48 characters per server like we were able to during the initial run?
I bring this up because I was a server hopper. I had enough money to sub to the game, but buying extras wasn't really in my budget at the time. When the game went f2p, and we got the stipend, that alone helped me stay up on most of the things I wanted, like powersets and the occasional costume set. Extra character slots were not part of the budget back then so when I filled up a server I simply started making alts on other servers. In doing this I alleviated my severe altitis to an extent and met a lot of new people on the other servers. Pinnacle was my home, so all my extra vet slots went there ( think I had 20+ alts there, all lvl 50), but I had Virtue, Defiant and Justice maxed out as well. Most of the other English speaking servers had alts as well, some of them near capacity.
All told I believe I had more than 120 alts, 50+ were lvl 50.
Now, unless we get more than 2 servers back AND can max out to 48 alts per server I'd still have to max out 2 servers plus most of a third to get everything I had back.
Granted, I don't know just how the new team will run CoH: Reborn, but I do find it unlikely they will reopen all 15 servers to us. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they have a plan to make it a "one server' type setup similar to how Champions Online works. Using globals to separate out duplicate hero names. While that has been argued as well, I don't care what system they use for that, I'm good with either.
For me, the characters I had, the items they held, the SG's they belonged to... all these things were destroyed during the shutdown. I can live with not getting them back. I would certainly LIKE to get it all back, but it may not be feasible for *me*. If I were to get everything back, I'd likely have to start up a second account for new alt ideas... which isn't a bad thing, just costly. And as for deleting... not gonna happen, I couldn't bring myself to do that, after everything they and I have gone thru.
Luckily, this is a fictional universe, one populated by super heroes. Alternate universes, clones and/or coming back from the dead are old hat.
I can reroll and still have a ton of fun!