It's possible that they plan on doing a combination of both. Right now, Dungeons and Dragons Online is free-to-play with a microtransaction store. However, if you don't want to pay for individual pieces of content, you can pay for a subscription and get all of it.

They wouldn't make a point of saying "these items are non-refundable" if they were just talking about some normal stuff you bought from an NPC shopkeeper with gold you collected from mobs.

Either way, it's gonna be worth it. This game looks great.

...

I stayed up for hours checking to see when their site went up when beta signups started.

But a cash shop huh....

Imo this had the most potential to rival WoW. However there are people that won't think twice about dropping thousands of dollars into their characters. Even moreso when you're talking star wars fans. Game just flopped for me.