Which leads to other ideas: Tiered companion gear crafted from the appropriate profession, companions available from each profession tiered based on quality, maybe a new profession "Beastmaster".
20 years of experience, time gateway servers were down is approx what would be needed to do physical replacement, wiring repair and testing. Plus another few days to come up with patches that obviously didn't work(only up for an hour before dropping again).
Here's a few observations I have thought of: 1. Watching the explosion of negative response from the gateway shutdown, I have something to say. If you think that Cryptic didn't weighed the pros and cons of alienating the player base against the time, effort, money and servers needed to keep the gateway up, you're dumb. Try…