Free to play games that cost nothing like Genshin, Honkai Star Rail, and many others compensate you for time the game is down for maintenance. World of Warcraft is run by a billion dollar gaming oligopoly, costs $15 a month, full of insane microtransactions… and they can’t possibly get maintenance done in less than 9 hours ??? But also, no compensation at all, truly astounding to me
Those free to play games might cost nothing, but they still got lots of people bringing in loads and loads of money. Otherwise they wouldn’t even exist in the first place, I’m willing to bet some of those free games even make more money than WoW does (because those actually are riddled with microtransactions to the point they’re often pay-to-win).
Also WoW announces their downtimes ahead and they’re part of the agreement you accept when buying into the game, which also includes extended downtime. There’s no way to maintain a game like that without downtime anyway, especially around new expansion launches and big events when it gets more hectic.
Also, just complaining how they “can’t get maintenance done in less than 9 hours” makes me believe you have absolutely no clue how insane the infrastructure behind these kind of games are. Especially those that have been running for nearly 20 years.