To your first point: Can you link to anything that would back this up besides anecdotes? I'm unconvinced that "I am surrounded by pirates" is more authoritative than the NPD's report.
To your second point: As devinj pointed out, there are a number of private servers that enable playing MMOs without connecting to the servers, albeit with a scale of a few hundred players. A few of them even tweak experience or drop settings for a "more entertaining" experience. In addition, Blizzard was well-known, successful, and loved before World of Warcraft so I'm inclined to lean more towards the notion that there success is because of quality design rather than MMO/DRM implementation.
I'll provide a second anecdote. The only pirated games that I have/have ever had were ones that were no longer purchasable. The same is true for all but one of my friends. And that one friend who does pirate games never purchases a single one.
I believe that MetricMike was trying to point out that your anecdotes are still just anecdotes and don't weigh nearly the same as an official study/report. Remember, the plural of anecdote isn't "data", it's not even "anecdata"...
Right, it's "experience". Or, if you prefer, "nonrandomly sampled data". That means they aren't representative of high confidence, nor are they imaginary.
To your second point: As devinj pointed out, there are a number of private servers that enable playing MMOs without connecting to the servers, albeit with a scale of a few hundred players. A few of them even tweak experience or drop settings for a "more entertaining" experience. In addition, Blizzard was well-known, successful, and loved before World of Warcraft so I'm inclined to lean more towards the notion that there success is because of quality design rather than MMO/DRM implementation.