@Tuoni The thing is, if you ignore what the term means, it just becomes a meaningless term that people throw around to insult devs and companies, instead of a red line that a company cannot cross. Millions of people are often wrong, and just because everyone is wrong doesn't mean you have to abandon the correct definition, which acts to form a good barrier against abusive practices in a game's mechanics. The equivalent in politics would be calling everyone a Nazi, thus diluting and therefore ignoring the impact the word (and what that organization did).
There is a reason populist movements engage in heavy name calling by calling their opponents traitors, enemies of the people, murderers etc, as it is a powerful tool to divert the public's attention from actual problems. The masses playing games are pretty much doing the same thing to game developers by accusing them of P2W even if it isn't actually the classical definition of paying to gain an advantage that a free player could never attain. This is usually because they're frustrated with something in the game's mechanics or their own unwillingness to grind out a game (which in turn indicates that they don't actually like the core game loop). A good example of this right now is Magic the Gathering's Arena. During the time when the meta was fun to play, there were little accusations of "P2W". Now that the current meta is boring and repetitive, there are plenty of accusations of "P2W"; the real reason is because the current game is boring to play, not because the game is actually "paying to win".
At the end of the day, paying for convenience is a proven way to keep a game alive (League of Legends being the best example; one champion could take days to farm for, or you can instantly buy it with real money), and is needed for any modern game business model to work. Pay to Win kills games.
You might have heard of a recent indie game called Mordhau, which is completely free after the initial payment, with free cosmetics, free weapons, free progression and etc. That game was at the top of Steam's charts, but has now fallen down to the wayside, simply because of the fact that it is no longer reasonable for the devs to keep investing all their time into a product with little return, and therefore the updates come very slowly. If that game had a standard modern business model (pay for convenience, such as quickly buying new weapons that might otherwise take 24 hours of gameplay to grind, and cosmetics), they would have had access to more revenue, which in turn would allow the devs to invest more money into creating more content. The gaming world worships the idea of returning to the old days of buying a game once and never paying again while having full content at low time investment. This used to work when games were not a service, when they were mostly singleplayer, were never patched, never updated, and there was little competition. This no longer applies to modern games. If Fractured is to thrive in the modern world, it needs to adopt modern business models so it can compete with all the other great alternatives out there.
