If I understand correctly, two things enabled (the flippin’ brilliant) tobtoh to maintain his oligopoly:
1. An artificial, rigid caste system that allowed only a tiny pool of players to produce the best buffs
2. An artificial, rigid "ingredients" system that ensured the best buff could only be made from one extremely rare material (and no amount of innovation could escape this)
Anarchists would argue that those types of market restrictions are bound to cause oligopolies to form!
That said, even with his oligopoly, it sounds like he nearly single-handedly created a huge market for that avian meat, and that market enriched a lot of other players.
He didnt create a market - left to normal dynamics in video games, the resources would have been distributed normally, probably more efficiently on average as well.
Check WoW out for example - the analysis on the spreads, ideal prices to sell ores, gold, are at OCD levels of accuracy.
Addons scan the auction house for undervalued goods, undertake pricing strategies, hold historical data on those goods and allow people to know whether an item is under or over valued.
Websites are dedicated to identifying prices across all the servers and that leads to people doing cross server arbitrage.
He didn't improve the market, he just made a monopoly. A pretty cool one at that.
1. An artificial, rigid caste system that allowed only a tiny pool of players to produce the best buffs
2. An artificial, rigid "ingredients" system that ensured the best buff could only be made from one extremely rare material (and no amount of innovation could escape this)
Anarchists would argue that those types of market restrictions are bound to cause oligopolies to form!
That said, even with his oligopoly, it sounds like he nearly single-handedly created a huge market for that avian meat, and that market enriched a lot of other players.
I might be misreading the story, though!