Addressing the desire to maintain characters online... how about first, just being able to save a copy of your character to your own computer... just in case? The idea being that if a server goes under, that you have all your hard work saved and can at a later time import it into the game when the server comes back up or import it into a different server.
There would need to be generous documentation on how the saved character files were organized, and how they plugged into the game, so that a developer could write a conversion app to import the file into their version of the game. A RESPEC might be needed, but if the conversion app does a good job on matching the details in the file with equivalent details in their game, it should work fairly well... sans details that are in the file that don't exist in the game.
Additionally, some sort of open source viewing app would be really awesome, to be able to view the character offline, separately from the game.
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And thinking along these lines... is it possible now to save a file with your character's stats, powers, photo of the character, etc.?
I was lucky enough to have had a bunch of Mid's Hero Planner and COH Planner files saved, which were very helpful in rebuilding here at Homecoming what I had lost on live. But to tell you the truth, it would have been so much better to be able to save you character's build, origin story, binds, costume (or at least a jpeg of the toon), etc. directly from the game.