well I went through the trouble of typing this out only to find the main WOW forums semi hosed, so I figure I will post it here...
As someone who has worked in large scale infrastructure and MSP market space for about the last 10 years of my life this maintenance strikes me as quite odd.
Planned 24 hour outages? No offense, as I can't assume to know what it is your doing with this 24 hours as you really havent provided any details as to what it is that you are actually aiming to accomplish, but this is unnaceptable for a highly demanded online service.
Me personally I dont play daily, and probly wouldnt be playing during this outage anyhow, but I know there are alot of people that would be, and I think you are approaching this the entirely wrong way.
The proccess of patching/hotfixing/fully replacing a server should not be an accross the board 24 hour downtime. Ill be honest, from the smaller company extranets to large fortune 500, highly abused systems(much more traffic and activity than wow) I've helped to build and maintain, I can honestly say if I proposed a full 24 hours of outage to a full system, I would be sacked on the spot unless I had one hell of a detailed explanation for such.
If you want to fix large system wide problems there is a right way to do this.
Test your patches on a seperate server and use it as a guinea pig, prove the concept, dont repeat the mistakes of releasing questionable server fixes into the wild and try to solve everything at once, keep it simple and tackle one problem at a time.
Migrating to new code should be in the realm of the normal scheduled maintanence, extended slightly as needed. I fail to see what you need a full 24 hours for, if your replacing the whole damn cluster (as I assume each realm runs on) this is a minor proccess of stopping the realm, porting all DB data for chars/gold/stats/ah/mail/etc to a new identical cluster and turning the damned thing on in a matter of at most a few hours.
Lastly, even if this large window was needed, why would you take down 1/3 of your (self contained) realms all the the same time.
Taking down say, Destromath doesnt impact anything further than Destromath in and of itself.
When you take down 1/3 of your content and users can get similar content from the remaining 2/3 that apparently have similar perfomance issues, you are making yourself a nice new headache.
just my $.02
And yes considering most people pay 15 a month for a subcription, rested XP bonuses would be better compensation for those not at lvl 60, and something beyond the $.50 you are giving back to the vast numbers of lvl 60s that have obviously been devoting a large amount of their time, heart and soul into this game and community.
Unintential page claims 4tw! 
