Comment by anigbrowl

Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others

No, donating would be 'here, have a bunch of games resources, enjoy.' People who buy virtual goods are purchasing status - maybe purely social status Veblen goods (eg hats and other rare-but-fundamentally useless items) or maybe strategic status (eg weapons/armor that give you a combat buff in their own right, plus might also indicate that you're tremendously experienced if you earned rather than purchased it, which is often unknown to the other players).

some years ago I got into a Roman Gladiator game that ran on this model, that was both fun and easy (for me, ie I happened to be good at it). So I ground my way to being quite a high level player and winning a number of fancy items, and accepting challenges from other players. In a well balanced game every item buff has some sort of weakness, eg it's vulnerable to particular spam attacks or regular hits from some other specific weapon. I had figured out most of these by grinding my way up, and after a while I noticed that people who had a lot of fancy items got super abusive if they lost a combat to grinding techniques rather than better gear, to the point where multiple players started harassing my platform account rather than just my in-game character. There was a big inverse snobbery against working too hard at it; I was even accused of 'violating the spirit of the game' ¯\(°_o)/¯