What is the deal with 30 day game time actually being 29 days? How is this legal?

[Nadie]

There's literally nothing wrong here, just your understanding of how the subscription works. Yes your first subscription will likely be short, because it's 30 calendar days, but how much so depending on what time in the day you started. However, subsequent subscriptions (assuming you don't have a subscription break) are always exactly 30 days. I've been subscribed non-stop for nearly 10 years now, they've always given me exactly what I paid for.

Also your chat support ticket, you say about May 9th being day 29, but it's not. You can literally write it out:

The same can be done for what chat support said about the next 30 days being 10th May to 8th June.

To say there's literally nothing wrong, you've either misread or you're not counting correctly by not taking into account that you're supposed to count starting at the start of the day through the end of that day for a day.
Count again until 00:00 June 8th instead of through June 8th until 23:59:59 and you'll see they were saying it's 29 instead of 30 days by your count. You'll see how CSR was saying that final day is at most one second long, thus one less day than advertised. I'm assuming they're incorrect and that Phone Support is right.

CSR would never clarify it goes by calendar days and not actually 720 hours and it doesn't say that anywhere despite me pointing out that going by hours it doesn't work like that. In WoW, 60 days ends in 1440 hours not 60 calendar days which could be 1426 hours and 1 second instead if you activate it at the "wrong" time.

It's weird to have a system like this that seems designed to cheat people out of time they pay for that no other online game subscription uses, but that isn't the biggest point.

The big issue is where they kept saying was that the automatic renewal that happened would be 29 days instead of 30 which further confuses things since I could understand how the first day was only an hour and a half (even though the CSR wouldn't say that and kept gaslighting instead), but not how the renewal could be 29.
It being calendar days, which is how you're counting correctly there if you are getting the whole 24 hours of that last day you count, you're missing that they however kept saying it's until that day rather than through that day. They said it ends at 00:00 which is the start of a day. This was the big issue. They kept saying it's 29 days, and that that's somehow 30, telling me I'm being scammed and that there's nothing I can do about it and that I'm wrong. I tried so many ways to explain to them that that's 29 days if what they're saying is true and they refused to understand how they must be stating that incorrectly.
Through June 8th 23:59 is correct, which is what Phone Support said. Until June 8th 00:00 is incorrect and missing an entire day. More specifically, the way Phone Support stated it is technically it ends at 00:00 the following day that the website states and that is the day that renewal would be billed which makes perfect sense.
The CSR didn't seem to understand that 00:00 is the start of a day and not the end of it, which makes all of the difference, despite me pointing it out to them repeatedly many different ways.

In other words, to be completely clear: if you stop counting at the start of that day instead of through the end of that day, that's one less day which is how the CSR was counting but insisting it's not.

Sarcasm...? This game only has a few hours planned maintenance every 4 months...

And what about unplanned maintenance? That happens a lot.
Crystal just had another 8 hours of that which can be an entire day most people would play. I know there was maintenance in Feb, April, and May, plus some other emergency ones if I'm not mistaken. That's not every 4 months.
Lots of games compensate for that. Oddly enough, it's mainly f2p games which compensate for standard maintenance.

[worldofneil]

you're supposed to count starting at the start of the day through the end of that day for a day.

Says you... that's not how it works for THIS game. As you already put in your first post, it's calendar days. You might not agree with it, but that's how it works here. Your first month will be less than 24 actual hours depending on what time you start. Automatic renewals going forward won't be affected.

And what about unplanned maintenance? That happens a lot.

Well it is unplanned... and still quite infrequent I think. It's literally a few hours at a time, at most.

It's been this way since 2.0 (2013, longer if you include 1.0 subscriptions) so I can't see it changing.

If you're this upset about it, sorry, but maybe this isn't the game for you.