In my experience with games like Path of Exile and Guild Wars 2, players are eager to purchase cosmetics and temporary exp boosting items. More often than not, if you’re selling gear or permanent stat enhancements in your cash shop, you will alienate your playerbase and a lot of people will end up leaving the game and not spending any money on it. P2W is severely looked down upon in the US and will kill your game faster than bots or gold sellers.
Instead, to ensure the longevity of your game and a healthy player and cash shop relationship (as well as beating the gold sellers at their own game), you could offer currency conversion. Want more in game gold? Players could purchase cash shop TP (or gems or whatever you’re calling them) and convert it into game gold. There’s no reason to even go to gold sellers, then. Guild Wars 2 does this with their gem store and it certainly hasn’t hurt the game.
Cosmetics and temporary exp boosts as well as toys have also been a big hit with GW2. Also things like revive orbs and makeover kits and name changing kits. I’m stating this just because it’s an example and I don’t expect IMC to copy the model directly, but I AM hoping that enough anti P2W threads will change their minds about their current cash shop and maybe save this game from self destruction.
More often than not, people who can’t afford to buy stat or gear from a cash shop will leave the game. However, these same people are more likely to stay around and eventually purchase something cosmetic or a temporary exp boost or something that allows them to rename/redesign their character if the cash shop exists only for these purposes.
I know there are threads about this already, but I’d like to see more pop up as it would most likely help IMC see how badly their customers (and potential customers) want the cash shop to change. Plus, more suggestions in a new thread are never really a bad thing, especially when an older one has pages and pages worth of replies already. Makes things easier to see immediately.
That’s just my two cents.