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But you don't "pirate" the experience of playing with every other person who has purchased the game, being able to run into your real friends in a virtual world by sheer coincidence of numbers. Running your own WoW server is like running your own instance of Facebook—the network effects just aren't there.

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"the experience" is hardly the same thing as "the server component".

Even so, this breaks down: this effect is (as you have noted) not just limited to MMOs. It actually applies to all games/services that use some kind of centralized network to connect players/friends. This means everything from Team Fortress 2 to Warcraft 3.

Sure. But the argument "it's useless to pirate WoW because you couldn't get on the server anyway" breaks down in this case because you could pirate WoW and run a server.

Yes, it's not as good as the real thing. Neither is running Starcraft without Battle.net, which doesn't stop it from being a fun game even in pirateable form.

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