A cash shop should not exist in a p2p title at all, everything is supposed to be paid for with that subscription. All the wages, all the overheads etc.

If they start adding extra things to buy then it will influence development meetings, cosmetics or not. The point of a cash shop is to sell that new item, they aren't going to make design choices with actual content that hurt sales.

To use an analogy, it's like a company in a small town that makes roads (running the mmo and making it the best they can) and opens another side venture making soft tyres (cash shop). If they realise they can make a lot of money from tyres if the roads are less perfect and more bumpy do you really think they will make those roads as perfect as they can be? or will the boss in charge of everything make the roads less perfect so they can ensure people buy those special tyres and have a softer ride? It's common sense how it works.

That's why I hate cash shops, not for what they are but for how they influence development. There are so many ways a cash shop is negative to a game like this, in terms of lowering the aesthetic of items available ingame (They will have meetings about, will these new ingame items hurt cash shop sales because they look nicer etc), to taking development time away from content to make cash shop items (cause they sure won't take on new staff for that) and finally do hurting lore because they will start adding things like baseball caps and things.. As I said above, the cash shop becomes a factor in all design decisions from that point on and that's not a good thing.

The sad mentality of most mmo players is that cash shops make people spend a huge amount of money and they are easily manipulated by peer pressure.