Blizzard has been very good about compensating players for downtime issues and the fact that they recognize that players are paying for time that they could not use and compensating them for that loss of time is great. However, in this case I think Blizzard is understating the impact. As mentioned above for many players the impact was over a week of time that they could not play the way they are used to playing. For some players the impact was fairly short and non-impacting.
At last we would like to thank you for your patience during this time and look forward to seeing you in game!

There are many problems in any patch to a game, as a world of warcraft players, I come across many of them. Of late, Blizzard put their biggest patch in place, which is getting ready for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion. It is patch 3.0.2. There are many issues for plenty of players after this patch, so Blizzard announces a credit of time to players in response to their doubt and misunderstanding.     Here is the comment from Blizzard issued:
     Since the latest patch Echoes of Doom released, we have gone through a series of optimizations in order to increase overall game performance. We’ve seen steady, stable populations and a flurry of activity and excitement during the Hallow’s End event and the latest rumblings of zombie attacks. It’s been an exciting time for us as we draw closer to the release of our second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.
We’ve reached a point where we feel we can now accurately evaluate the events since the patch release. Though overall downtime has been minimal, players have experienced latency, inaccessible instances, and general frustrations. We are therefore announcing that we will be issuing compensation to accounts in all realms in the US, Oceanic, and Latin American regions. Accounts that are currently active and in good standing will be credited with an additional three days of game time.
 When the patch launched, there’re issues getting onto the servers for a few days. During that time many servers just would not let you log on at all, or would take forever to get on to. Once you were able to log onto the servers it took over a week until you could reliably get into an instance. There were several days when my guild gathered to get into a raid and then spent almost and hour to get into a raid.
As much as we would like everything to go perfectly, they rarely do. However, that is why there are Q&A environments, and test labs. This is also why there are utilities to load test servers and the server infrastructure. Even with all of this, which I am sure Blizzard uses, issues slip by. The ones that slip by though should be small and of minor impact.