City of Villains: Free to Play?

Last year I posted about paying to play an MMORPG and how not only do I not have a problem with doing so, but I think it's been a good idea. The City of Heroes/City of Villains game is apparently going to switch to free to play during their next patch and that has me thinking about giving it another shot. On the surface this doesn't make a lot of sense. If I really wanted to play the game why wouldn't I have reactivated my old account already?  As things stand right now doing so would get me access to everything in the game (I may need to also buy expansions? I don't know.) but in the new model I'd get a lot of stuff completely free but I'd have to pay money afterwards to get everything. For the switch to make any sense one would imagine if I actually wanted everything I'd be paying a fair bit more.

Looking at their comparison page it looks like if you play for free you only get to choose from about half the classes. You lose a third of the power sets. The claim is you get 70% of the (admittedly awesome) character builder. You lose the ability to join a guild, or send private messages, or mail, or write on the forums. You get 2 character slots instead of 12. Your AH usage is 'limited'. They appear to be adding payer exclusive servers and priority to payers in the log-in queues. You can't even talk to a GM if you're a free player. If you had an old account at some point you get to come in at the second tier, so I'd be able to send private messages and mail. I could join but not form a guild.

Now, the reason I was intrigued is I thought maybe other people would want to play too. I stopped playing the first time around because I didn't know anyone but my brother who played at all and I'm bad at making friends. My character was awesome. Oroku Saki who led an army of ninjas called the Foot Clan. Not terribly imaginative, but awesome nonetheless. Looking at what free players actually get though, I'm not sure that would even work. Not being able to send tells in game seems absolutely crippling in an MMO. They do say it's subject to change before launch so I'll be keeping an eye on things to see but if it works the way it says on that page I can't in good conscience recommend to anyone that they sign up as a free to play account.