I remember playing Ragnarok Online back in 2005ish. I was working on my merchant. Merchants had an ability to get better sale prices to NPCs, so one common way

I remember playing Ragnarok Online back in 2005ish. I was working on my merchant. Merchants had an ability to get better sale prices to NPCs, so one common way to make money by buying some item from players in bulk for more than they could get vendoring it, and you make margin on it by getting even more. Arbitrage! My skills weren't high enough to compete with other merchants on the highest margin common items, so I decided to try one of the lower priced things. Squeeze into some kind of niche, you see. Around this time, I discovered the censorship list was enforced client side (oh the wild west old days...), To make a long story long, there were these crabs and they dropped an item called "nippers". They were kind of a cute thing because though that was what they were called by the game's creators, the game censored you for saying it. I removed "nip" from the list of gylphs, I could shout an offer to buy them without interference. This let me buy these items from players without any competition. As the only dedicated purchaser, I was able to preserve a much higher margin. Thanks to a soft monopoly preserved by regulations and information asynchrony, I was able to make significantly more money than I would have otherwise. That taught a lot of lessons to ~15 year old me. If only I could have applied those lessons in the real world!