Just some musing:
Unless there's an approval from NCSoft (tacit or explicit), there won't be a single server like we had back when the game was running. Either costs will grow too much, someone will get bored or spooked and kill their server, or they get a letter from NCSoft telling them to C&D.
I feel like the future of CoH will be multiple private servers operating under the radar. It might be closer to a single person game or a small group of friends. It's possible that there will be a facility to extract your character from a server, so you can have a backup, and to allow restoration on another server. Think of it like transhuman sleeving - download your character into a new body somewhere else.
The coding team working on understanding, simplifying and deploying new binaries based on the i24 code is probably the future of the game. They still need the back end database data, but that's probably coming still. Once that's released, it's only a matter of time before you can run your own private server on commodity hardware. It might take some time.
I had a great time playing on the test server this weekend. I got to play with my friend that introduced me to the game in the first place; we re-rolled our original toons and had a blast. We got to show our kids and they loved it too. My daughter made her first character in Icon and was disappointed that the test server was down, but I have hope now that the code's out. The test server might not have worked out (it might still - the jury's still out on that) but there will be City of Heroes in the future.
I'm happy to have some real hope going forward.
