My argument never claimed that WoW was fun, or that console RPGs were more or less fun. I was just comparing the value per hours played. Obviously, if you don't like the game then you're not going to play it and you get something like $50/per hour before you don't renew for that next month.

Writing batch files isn't fun by any stretch of the imagination, though, so that's a bad example; a better one would be a basketball which might give someone 100 hours of enjoyment per $1 spent, if you're the type of person who would rather do that sort of thing.

If you're a casual player, and you log in 10 hours per week, then you're getting 2000 hours( = 50 mo x 4 [wks/mo] x 10 [hr/wk]) of gameplay for those $700 dollars. Let's round that to 3 hours per dollar. The alternative, to a casual fantasy-loving gamer, would be to keep up with the steady stream of console RPGs that keeps coming out. If you don't care about getting the infinity plus one sword or reaching 101% completion (which you don't, because remember that you're a casual gamer), then it takes roughly 50 hours to beat any new game of the Dragon Fantasy variety. Last I checked, these games cost around $50 each, giving you about 1 hour for every $1 you spend on it. Sure, you could go for 101% completion if you wanted to, and that might stretch the game out to 150 hours and make it a match for WoW, but if you were that hardcore then you would probably be logging 30 hours per week in Azeroth and keeping the ratio about the same. WoW is cheap.