I played Asheron's Call, pretty popular early MMORPG from 1999 initially. It was very different than other MMOs in a lot of ways. There was no P2W, you just paid a monthly subscription, no cash shop, no microtransactions, etc.

Buuut... there was P2W! Kind of. You could buy stuff on eBay. Items and currency, but more importantly, you could buy outright characters. This was a game where getting high level was very hard initially, so people sold characters for $1,000 to $5,000 in the first 2, maybe 3 years.

This was especially a thing on Darktide, the hardcore PvP server, where it was hardest to level up (since people could attack you at any time) and where being high level did the most for you, since you could go destroy people and be a badass. The guy who ran my guild said he spend $80,000 on the game, constantly buying up the new highest level characters so he'd always be the highest level guy on the server. Also the best armor in the game was a unique item that dropped once per server during an early event, I believe it sold for $40,000 at one point. For a single in-game item (well, set of armor).

Some of the craziest shit I've ever seen in a video game, especially as this was in like 2000-01, seems like the stone age now. Just an amusing example of how even if there wasn't P2W from the devs, the players added it themselves in some cases.