"You'll also be required to maintain an active City of Heroes account"

Pay for a beta? No thanks.

No, you're paying for access to City of Heroes.  The game whos expansion you're testing.  I'm not sure how other companies test their expansions, ut it's always made sense to me.

Now, if a company was asking you to pay a subscription fee to beta test an as yet unreleased game, then I'd completely agree with you.

I think good ole jeff was assuming that this was a new game or something and not just an expansion of an already published game.

Easily possible.  They did play CoH in the past though (it appears) so that depends on if they followed the game at all after they left or not.

Yeah i forgot it was an expansion.  I would just be resubbing just for the beta as the regular game is beat.  Im hoping this expansion is nothing but a whole new game anyways.  If it is "Hey let's let a blaster run through the villains side and vice versa. Call it a complete failure.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it will be a complete failure.  As it stands it is supposed to open up the portal to the other reality you go through in the portal missions.  So a whole new explorable area it appears and also allows for heroes to do missions to then become villains and villains to do missions to become heroes.  CoX isn't  for everyone, but I like the game as long as they stop nerfin the dag-gum scrappers.

let the expansion be open world no instanced missions (except Task and strike forces.). and give brutes spines and I come back

It will be open world didn't you read what I wrote?  I don't know bout the Brutes and spines thing, but who knows.  I looked at the trailer again and it appears to me that they are going to make it like an alt version of Atlas Park and maybe other areas as well.