I had a friend with 87 billion inf and a base full of high quality purples. what are the chance he would get restored?
I'd say zero, as 2 billion influence was the max a character could hold.
I would say you are wrong. there were ways to hold it in 20 billion chunks. I saw him pay the guy that built his base for him with a full set of armageddons
Well, technically speaking it wasn't possible to hold more than 2 billion inf
on an individual character. If only characters were restored, its unlikely anyone holding 87 billion was holding it in 48 characters, and wouldn't get that influence back with character restores.
The only way to hold more than 2 billion in inf per character was to hold it using auction house bids. You bid for something that you know the order will never be filled, and you bid 1-2billion in for that item or items. That bid "ties up" influence in the auction house, and theoretically speaking you can retrieve it by logging into that character and cancelling the bid. With enough auction house slots in use by enough characters, its possible to hold extremely large amounts of actual influence, separate from bases holding valuable items.
But unless bases themselves are restored, the valuable stuff wouldn't come back. And unless the auction houses come back with actual order data, the largest repository of influence in the game would also be vaporized. At shutdown I had over a hundred billion inf (I'm not even certain without looking at logs how much more than that) in more than one account. But I probably had only about 10 billion on various characters, and even that was only because I started retrieving inf from auction house storage and giving it away after the shutdown announcement.
I am also unaware of any way to hold influence in a single 20 billion chunk. And if I knew of someone that would build an elaborate base for just the price of a full set of armageddons, I would have had him build one on every server I played on. Even before Freedom I had more of the things than I knew what to do with, because my "acquisition rate" exceeded the rate at which I could level alts.
That's what happens when you spend years triple and quadruple boxing test after test after test of the game mechanics, and then one day in I19 you decide to just put all of them on automatic farming pilot.