hehe, I believe the ToS/UA nicely waives our rights to any 'reimbursement' for scheduled maintenance/unexpected downtimes :)

In the past theyve only given that out as a courtesy when things went REALLY bad :P

Tuesdays are already given to us as free days.

'unplanned'? how long have you been playing this game? it's every week. that's fairly planned...

as for bringing up other realms, imagine if one realm were brought up early. how many people would long on that server? the server could not handle that many people and would crash, and then there would be all new issues. now imagine they bring up half the realms and they have all of the wow population suddenly try to log onto them. half the servers crash.

seriously, people need to think a little bit about why things are the way they are before suggesting they be done some other way.

Well, I've been playing nearly 5 years now. Unplanned means just that. 'Scheduled' defines the weekly (although not every week, go figure that one out) maintenance. Did Blizz plan for extra downtime? No; therefore it's 'unplanned'.

And yes, of course everyone would go to some other realm if their realm was down. If you've been playing long enough, you'd know that's exactly what everyone did way back when.

Goldi,
I seriously doubt you have been playing for 5 years. If you had been then you would know that EVERY Tuesday (excluding holidays) for the last 5 years has been maintenance day. And this is exactly how it has been done EVERY one of those days. Sometimes it's short, almost just a quick reboot and they're back up, sometimes it take 8-10hr because they need some major overhauls or there's a minor/major patch. I really don't think you are going to win any case saying "I want comp time for when the servers are down for maintenance". Any time you get to play between 5am-6pm PT on Tuesdays is really kind of bonus time. If Tuesday is the only day you have time to play, well sucks to be you, maybe you should find another game or move to Europe where they get to do this on Wed.

never before have I seen such a huge network of servers. Seriously, how many servers do you think they have? The more you have the longer things like maintenance take. Frankly I am thrilled that they service/update/reload them once a week. Less bugs.

I don't think there's anything "planned" about 15 hours worth of outages. We know going into every Tuesday that there's going to be scheduled maintenance in the morning. This is fine, and it's worked for 4 years. People go to work and to school, think about things other than WoW for a little while, and Blizzard gets to do what it needs to do to keep the game up and running for the rest of the week. But when it starts to spill over into the afternoons and the evenings, things start to get hazy. For many people that could be a full night out of the week that they'll be simply unable to play a game that they lawfully pay $15 every single month for (and who knows how much else in various other charges). What about people who's only day off could be Tuesday? I know in my line of work, it's not unheard of at all to work six days per week and get a random weekday as the only day off.

It just seems like Blizzard in trying to do a service to their players is actually doing a disservice--however minor it might seem to some. Maintenance schedules could be changed to happen in the early hours of the morning a few nights per week, rather than doing it in a huge block one day. That way, any "extended" maintenance would merely spill over into the morning and be likely up by noon, rather than being down until 4, 5, 6, or even 7 in the evening.

People like to play this game, and not getting to play it often makes people upset. It's not "QQ-ing", it's just not getting to participate in a greatly enjoyed hobby and being understandably upset about it.