One raider, one guild, one bot.
Hootus was built by a Warlock in The Night Owls who got tired of watching an officer click through menus while thirty people waited to pull.
A guild complaint, turned into a bot.
Nobody drew up a plan. The people running raid night kept griping about the same five minutes of clicking, and a raider sitting in the same Discord went and fixed it.
Everything since has followed that rule. Something annoys a real guild on a real Tuesday, it gets built, it ships.
- Where it started
The Night Owls wanted one command, not a menu.
Simen plays a Warlock in The Night Owls, raiding with friends, not running the night. He kept hearing the same gripe from the people who did run it: posting Tuesday meant clicking through menus while the guild sat waiting. So he built the fix, custom for them. One command to post the night, signups that knew a Druid from a Mage, a roster that kept itself honest.
- How it grew
Mists made it multi-flavour, and more than raids.
Rolling into Mists of Pandaria meant a second guild and a second version of the game, so the bot went multi-flavour. Signing up stayed a button with a class check behind it, not an emoji reaction nobody could remember. That guild leans social rather than hardcore, which is how Hootus grew past raid night into dungeons, heroics, scenarios, and alt runs.
- What it stayed
Built after raid night, not instead of it.
Same core underneath, a flavour on top for each version people still play. Still one person, fixing what breaks and adding the next flavour when it is ready. Nothing here was written for a pitch, and the everyday raid-night tools have been free the whole way.
- Guilds it was built inside
- 2Guilds it was built inside
- Flavours live today
- 4Flavours live today
- Person, still
- 1Person, still
- At the core, always
- FreeAt the core, always
No team, no roadmap deck, no investor update. One person, one guild, one bot.
There is nobody upstairs asking this to grow a paywall, and no quarterly update for backers who do not exist. The core is free and stays free.
Small comes with rules.
A one-person bot cannot promise the world, so it does not. It has been run this way since the first raid post landed in The Night Owls, and the line has not moved.
- The everyday raid-night tools are free, and the core stays free.
- A new flavour lands when the realms do, not on a slide with a quarter written on it.
- Every server is its own sandbox. Nothing crosses between guilds.
- A bug report lands with the person who wrote the bug.
- Features arrive because a guild complained on a Tuesday.
One raider, two characters, a couple of guilds.
The characters he raids on, and the guilds where every feature gets tested first.
I’m Simen. I play HexusPlexus, a Warlock in The Night Owls on Thunderstrike, and Sykepleier, a level 90 Shaman in Muppets Inc on Mirage Raceway.
I built Hootus because creating a raid in Raid-Helper meant clicking through menus while the guild sat waiting. I wanted to type one command and have the night posted, the signups checked against class and spec, and the right people pinged.
It started in The Night Owls, where I raid with friends, not as the raid leader. I listened to what ours kept griping about and built it custom for them. When I rolled into Mists I made it multi-flavour and folded in every annoyance I had with other bots. My Mists guild leans more social than hardcore, so they wanted Hootus to cover more than raid night, and that is how he grew past it.
No team, no roadmap deck, no investor update. One person, a couple of guilds, one bot.
Built for a real guild. Yours can use it too.
It started in one guild and grew because other raid leads asked to borrow it. Add HootusPlootus to your Discord, walk the wizard, and post your first raid with one command.