One additional point. Imagine if this was league legends, dota, or Team Fortress. What if you could buy a hat that gave you a marginal advantage? What if you could buy a secondary ability that would give you some perk over someone else? I guarantee you that game would lose so many players. And it would be pay to win.
There's one key distinction I think is being missed here: there's a difference between:
1) An in-game advantage that is only available through paying real money.
and
2) An in-game advantage that is available through either paying real money or in-game effort.
Granted, I haven't played Shadow Era but from Fox's descriptions it sounds very much like there are zero examples of 1) (though I think someone mentioned a preorder exclusive card but it's not in the online game) and many examples of 2) in Shadow Era.
Which, I admit,
could be called pay-to-win depending on your definition.
But that definition would already apply to Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends:
In TF2 you can get alternate weapons like the sniper's bow and the heavy's gun-that-applies-a-slowing-debuff through either in-game effort (iirc through getting enough achievements with those classes, or random drops, or whatever) or by simply forking over some real cash in the Mann Co. store. All those other weapons are supposed to be (and in my experience are) "sidegrades" rather than obvious advantages, but they do have uses, so a new player
does not have access to some pretty important tactical choices (that slowing gun can change things quite a lot), but they can choose to spend real money to get them.
Similarly, in LoL, you can get Runes by paying either IP (from playing games) or RP (from real money, with a few rare exceptions). This is actually far clearer a case than TF2 because going from an empty rune slot to a full rune slot in LoL is a flat-out advantage, and getting enough IP to fill out a complete level 30 set of runes can take a fairly long time. And having enough IP to buy alternate runes for alternate builds (not all champions work best off the same runes, to put it mildly) or flexibility takes even longer. So a new player who's willing to drop some real cash can get some significant advantages over another new player who's invested the same amount of time (or even substantially more time, depending) in the game.
My point being that, unless I'm missing some facts, LoL and (to a lesser extent) TF2 are
at least as pay-to-win as Shadow Era. But you don't seem to have the same kind of problem with LoL/TF2, which confuses me.
Anyway, I think that "pay-to-catch-up" may be a better term for all three games: compared to other players with the same amount of play-time, if no one else is paying real money you're probably on pretty close to an even footing. But if the other players have been at it longer (and had more in-game currency or whatever) or paid their own real money, then you would be at a disadvantage at least in terms of flexibility. But if you keep after the in-game-acquisition path you'll eventually catch up too.
