Lothic

Yes there's at least a long standing player-accepted "theory" that the 2 billion INF cap has something to do with software-based data types. As the theory goes 2 billion was picked by the Devs simply because that value can be cleanly represented by a single 32 bit signed Integer. It does admittedly seem reasonable to accept that.

But you have to remember back when this game was being launched almost 8 years ago 2 billion INF was a totally astronomical amount of INF to horde on one character. Without any market and a manual INF trading cap set at 9999 per trade the idea of being able to accomplish trades in the millions let alone in the billions was practically unthinkable. Basically this game existed for many years under the working paradigm that 2 billion was a far larger amount than anyone ever would or could need.

Obviously with the introduction of the market and IOs all that changed. From a coding point of view it would not be impossible to raise the cap. Depending on exactly what data type they did in fact use changing the cap could be more or less problematic. But no matter the details the INF cap could be increased beyond 2 billion if the Devs were willing to spend the time on it.

That leaves us with the real question: Will the Devs ever decide that it's worth the effort to increase the cap? Maybe, but I don't think it'll happen anytime soon despite the current market realities. You have to remember that even though there are probably several hundred players out there who routinely throw around billions of INF there are still many thousands of others who for whatever reason will probably never see 100 million INF on their characters much less 2 billion. For the overwhelming majority of players the 2 billion cap will continue to be more than sufficiently high. Also when you consider the prices of some of the top PvP IOs the only reason they go for around 2-3 billion INF now is that they are pegged to the current cap. If you hypothetically increased the cap to 10 billion it's quite likely those top IOs would simply jump up in price to around 10 billion and stop again. There's no substantive reason to raise the cap other than to see the number get bigger - the intrinsic "value" of the most valuable things in the game would not change.

So while the INF cap could be increased I suspect the Devs have decided there's not enough justification for it yet, if ever.

Sounds like a goofy attempt to turn Fanboys or Big Bang Theory into a reality TV show.
Seems like this could range from being completely stupid to mildly amusing in a "Mystery Science Theater" sort of way. *shrugs*

The irony of Bug Hunter from the Devs' point of view is that the more of these they hand out the more they tacitly acknowledge how buggy their game really is.

The concept behind Bug Hunter (as a reward to players for reporting serious, exploit-level bugs to the Devs) should have never been expressed as a public character-based badge in the first place. That implementation was fundamentally flawed for many different and terribly obvious reasons. The Devs should have figured out a better kind of reward to account for these things. An excellent example would have been a grant of a certain number of months free subscription to the game, the number of months commensurate with the severity of the bug as determined by the Devs. Almost anything like this would have been far more acceptable because it would have kept the entire idea of people finding bad bugs completely out of the public limelight where it belongs. There's a reason the Devs don't like to openly report exploit fixes - why on Earth they decided to break their own policy by granting public badges to players which only serve to advertise the need for such fixes is perplexing to say the least.

To me Bug Hunter is ultimately a sad footnote of a Dev "good intention" which ended up being expressed in a terribly ham-fisted and inappropriate way.

Now that they have the "doppelganger" tech having a dark clone of your character as a Tier 9 pet might be interesting. *smiles impishly*

I could see this tech being useful for physically impaired people and maybe for some types of GUI-lite games like first person shooters. I just don't think it would give you the kind of precise control you'd really need for a MMO. Every time you'd look around to check out your HPs or buff indicators you'd potentially move chaotically around or mess up your targeting.

Maybe this'll get better in the future, but I just don't see it being worthwhile now for something like CoH.

I'm not sure of the exact amount of bandwidth that typically gets used to run this game. But I seem to recall a recent thread that mentioned there were options that would allow you to cut off some of the data-mining type info that gets passed back to the servers. Maybe somebody knows more about that because that sounds like you could use that to minimize your traffic and maximize your time playing.

Good luck regardless.