The Part It Could Not Do

Retail guilds can run a raid night

Midnight and The War Within, nine raid instances between them, LFR through Mythic. Create the raid, take signups, build the lineup, close it out, same as Classic. The thirteen classes and forty specs were already in him, so a Vengeance Demon Hunter goes in as a tank and an Augmentation Evoker does not.

Every difficulty is offered at the size it actually runs at

Mythic is twenty for most of these raids and twenty-five for Sporefall and the Tidebound Grotto, and the Grotto runs its LFR at forty while its Normal and Heroic are thirty. Hootus takes each of those from Blizzard rather than assuming a number, so the picker cannot hand you a thirty-man Mythic that nobody can zone into.

Retail raids get their own feedback openers

Every other version had its own way of asking how the night went, and retail was borrowing the generic ones. It has four of its own now, and they know what a vault and a keystone are.

Error codes stop evaporating

When Hootus fell over he handed you a code and then quietly lost it, because the only place it was written was a container log that gets thrown away on the next deploy. Someone quoted one this week and there was nothing left to look it up in. Codes are filed for thirty days now, and an officer can run /manage error to find out what actually happened.

A guide for the one step nobody can automate

Guilds have been building a Community next to their guild purely to get an invite link that clicks, then sending the real guild invite anyway. It does not shorten anything, and it leaves people in a Community they never wanted. The new guide says what the API can and cannot do, why the workaround is not one, and what Hootus handles either side of it.

A server running two games sees both games’ raids

Link a second WoW guild and Hootus only ever offered you the raids of whichever one you picked as your main. Retail on Tuesday and Mists on Thursday now come out of the same picker, on the same server, and the raid expansion list narrows per game so trimming your Classic tiers no longer hides the other game entirely.

Nineteen retail dungeons on the LFG board

Normal, Heroic and Mythic across both tiers. Mythic+ is a different thing and is not in here: no keystone level, no affixes, no rating.

Retail loot, and logs that know which raid they came from

Loot comes off Blizzard's journal, boss by boss. The useful side effect is that Warcraft Logs matching finally works on retail: name the bosses in a report and Hootus can tell Manaforge Omega from Nerub-ar Palace instead of guessing from the clock. Item level is left blank on purpose, because one retail item id is four different item levels depending on difficulty, and a wrong number is worse than none.

Reassigning a character says exactly what it is about to do

It now reads "Moving Shioban on Nagrand from Bob to Alice" while you are still deciding, and updates as you change either half. Moving the wrong person’s character is not a mistake you want to find out about afterwards.

One bug, one message

A fault that fifty raiders hit used to send fifty separate alarms, and a stale button nobody can do anything about sent one too. Now the same fault reports once with a headcount, officers hear what broke without the stack trace, and a member clicking an old button wakes nobody.

/ginvite is now /invite-link

The old name was the same one WoW uses for the actual guild invite, which set the wrong expectation before anyone had typed a thing. It mints a link, so it says so. /ginvite still works and tells you what it is now.

The apply screen tells you all five steps, not the first one

Applying used to end on "the officers will get back to you", and everything after that arrived days later in a DM you might not be able to receive. It now lays out the lot: an officer reads it, join the Discord, run /verify, an officer invites you in game because Blizzard gives no bot a way to do it, and then Hootus makes you a member off the roster on his own.

Game roles hand themselves out

A server running two games gets a Discord role per game, but the only way to get one was to verify, so on one server two people out of forty-three held theirs. Own a character on a game and Hootus gives you that game’s role, and keeps it in step on every roster sync rather than waiting for someone to verify again. He only ever adds one: a role you were given stays given.

The multi-game setting stopped underselling itself

It called itself two games when it takes four, and it warned you that the second guild’s roster is never synced and its characters cannot be verified. Both of those stopped being true a while ago. It now says what it does: each link keeps its own roster, its own realm and its own Discord role.

Say the number you are actually planning around

A flexible raid offered five round numbers, which is not how anyone counts a roster. Pick any headcount in the range and the groups and the composition follow it.

If the raid list breaks, Hootus says so

A content table that stopped reading looked exactly like a version with no raids in it, which is how a broken deploy could pass for a quiet one. He checks all three on boot now and says plainly if they are unreadable.

The front page stopped saying everything five times

Class-aware signups appeared in six separate places on one page, roster sync in five. A whole section existed to restate the section above it. It is shorter, the four versions of WoW are named before the setup steps rather than after them, and the retail page is now linked from somewhere rather than nowhere.

The retail page is about raiding now, not about its own history

It argued three times against a claim nobody arriving had made, and carried a pull quote whose whole content was an apology for an earlier version of itself. Rebuilt around the raid night, with the nineteen dungeons, the forty specs and the missing pieces each given their own place. Mythic+ is still absent and still says why.

Content seeding cannot wander into a game it was not pointed at

Filling in new content used to mean rewriting every expansion whether you meant to or not, which is a fine way to nudge a TBC raid nobody asked you to touch. It now takes an explicit target, refuses to run without one, refuses a name it does not recognise instead of quietly doing nothing, and will not write at all unless you say so twice.

Retail progression knows which tier came first

Every retail instance used to rank at tier zero, so progression was one long tie. Midnight now sits ahead of The War Within, and it reads that order from the content itself, so the next tier slots in without anyone editing a list.

The backup-alt menu stopped running off the bottom

Discord shows twenty-five options and one member had forty-two characters, so nineteen of them simply were not there. The menu now offers the ones on the raid’s game, which fits, and typing a name in by hand still works if you want an alt from somewhere else.

LFG groups read farm targets from the right game

Whatever your guild ran, the farm targets on a group came from Mists of Pandaria, because the lookup had that expansion written into it. It reads the games your guild actually plays now. The guild directory and public board also find raid art for every game a guild runs rather than only the first, and the directory does it in one query instead of ten.

Officer views tell characters with the same name apart

Someone with five characters called the same thing on five realms turned every officer list into a guessing game, and unlinking or reassigning one of them acted on whichever the database handed over first. Reassigning actually moved both at once. Each one now shows its realm, and the button does what it says to the character you clicked.

The armory stopped guessing which realm you are on

Gear, pets and PvP lookups picked whichever same-named character came back first, and behind that sat a realm name hardcoded to one guild. On retail, where half of everyone’s characters live somewhere other than the guild realm, that is usually the wrong character or nobody at all. It reads the character’s own realm now, and a profile no longer hides your same-named alts.

Applying to a group sends the character you picked

Five characters with the same name on five realms went in as whichever one sorted first. You get the one you chose. Adding a PUG also takes Name-Realm now, so you can look someone up from another realm.

Set main in the avatar menu works again

It had been failing on every single click, quietly, because the page was sending one field and the server was reading another. Nobody would have known except that it never seemed to do anything.

Changing a character with a shared name lands on the one you clicked

If you have the same name on more than one realm, setting a main, unlinking, or changing a role or spec used to pick a row for you, and a role change wrote itself onto all of them at once. It goes to the character you clicked, and the realm now shows next to the name so you can tell them apart.

The signup buttons stopped offering the wrong game’s characters

On a server running two games, pressing a role button listed every character you own, so a Mists night offered your retail alts and forty-two names went into a menu that holds twenty-five. You see the ones that can actually zone in now, and if none of them can, Hootus says which game the raid is on rather than showing you an empty list. Marking yourself tentative or out still works whatever you play.

Picking between characters of the same name on the website

Five characters called the same thing gave you five identical lines and handed you whichever one came back first. Each one now carries its realm, and you get the one you clicked, with its own class and realm recorded against the raid.

The in-game invite card goes up when you approve someone

It used to wait for the recruit to verify, so anyone who was approved and then went quiet stayed invisible until an officer noticed nothing had happened. The card posts on approval now and updates itself when they verify, so it is still one card rather than two, and it says plainly that the guild invite is a person’s job in the game.

Signing up remembers which realm your character is on

Nine signups in ten had no realm recorded against them. Four separate ways into a raid all looked the realm up, used it, and then threw it away: the Discord buttons, marking yourself tentative or absent, signing up on the website, and an officer adding you from the planner. All four keep it now, and where the realm genuinely is not known it stays blank rather than being guessed at.

Verifying was never the step that put you in the guild

Hootus told accepted applicants that /verify was the step that actually put them on the roster. It never was and never could be. Blizzard has no way to send a guild invite from outside the game, so somebody has to sit in Azeroth and click it. The accepted DM, the application status page, the officer’s approve reply and the officer guides now all say that, and say whose job it is.

/ginvite stopped claiming to be the WoW command of the same name

In the game, /ginvite invites someone to your guild. In Hootus it hands out a Discord link so someone can verify a character, which is a different thing wearing the same name. It says which one it is now.

Two characters with the same name no longer break signing up

If you had the same name on two realms, the signup buttons fell over every single time, because Hootus offered Discord two options that looked identical and Discord refused the whole message. He tells them apart by realm now, and shows the realm next to the name so you can too. Eleven people were hitting this, and one of them had been unable to sign up for anything since the end of August.

Retail says players, Classic still says man

Nobody in retail has ever said twenty-man. Retail raids now read 20 players, the way the game writes it, across twenty-four places that were all speaking Classic. Classic keeps 10-man and 25-man, because that is what Classic says.

The raid badge stopped claiming Heroic next to the word Normal

It read 20H Mythic and 40H LFR, where the H means Heroic and the word beside it did not. Mists guilds had it too: every raid on the board said 25H Normal or 10H Heroic. The badge now says what the raid detail page has always said.

Edit Raid listed every raid twice and got the size wrong

It read The Voidspire (30-man) (30-man), twice over, and picked whichever size it happened to see first, so a Mythic twenty was laid out as thirty across six groups. One row per raid now, carrying the size the raid is actually on.

Mythic flexes on the two raids where Blizzard made it flex

Sporefall and the Tidebound Grotto run Mythic in flexible groups of fifteen to twenty-five, which is why they were the odd ones out in the raid list. Hootus was reading that twenty-five as a fixed size and pinning you to it. Mythic is still the fixed twenty everywhere else.

Dungeon tiers match what the game actually runs

Nine of these were wrong. The Frozen Halls were offering Titan Rune tiers they have never had, seven Cataclysm dungeons were offering a level eighty-five normal mode that does not exist, and Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub were offering Elemental Rune protocols the patch notes exclude them from by name. Ruby Sanctum was down as one boss on normal when it is four and runs heroic. The Culling of Stratholme was missing outright, and every Pandaria dungeon was missing Challenge Mode.

A Raid Finder kill is not a guild first kill

Hootus was reading the difficulty off every log and then never looking at it, which was harmless right up until retail arrived with LFR in it. A queued Raid Finder run would have set off the first-kill announcement and counted toward progression. It does not now. Normal, Heroic and Mythic still do, and nothing changes for a Classic guild, which has no Raid Finder to run.

Retail raids stopped pretending to be 30-man

Nobody has ever run a thirty-man raid. LFR, Normal and Heroic scale from ten to thirty, so Hootus asks how many you are planning around and sizes the roster to that, instead of laying out thirty seats and telling a guild of twenty-two it needs eight more. Mythic stays the fixed twenty it has always been, except on Sporefall and the Tidebound Grotto, where Blizzard says twenty-five and we checked that in three regions before believing it.

A Normal raid could be handed a Mythic roster

The web picked which version of a raid you meant by who could fit in it rather than by the difficulty written on it, so Sporefall on Normal was quietly being run as a twenty-five player Mythic, composition and all. It reads the difficulty now.

A dungeon offers its own difficulties, not its expansion’s

Every dungeon in a flavour was handed one list, so a MoP guild was offered Celestial Deadmines, which has never existed, and could not pick Gamma Utgarde Keep, which does. Each dungeon now offers what it actually runs. Vanilla guilds also stop being shown a Heroic that is not there.

Sending a feedback ask from the web tells you when it cannot

The button used to look like it worked whether or not anything went out, so an ask on a raid that closed days ago vanished without a word. It now either posts or says which of the ten reasons stopped it. The deadline the post states is also the deadline the button enforces now, rather than a couple of seconds later, which mattered on the retry path where the two could drift by an hour.

A raid reads its role targets from your own version of the game

Retail has a Firelands, an Ulduar, a Molten Core and a Karazhan of its own, so once the back catalogue arrives those names exist twice. Two lookups matched on the name alone and took whichever row came back first. Left alone, seventy-one of the raids currently on the books would have quietly changed how many tanks and healers they were asking for.

Running two WoW guilds from one server is not switched off

The retail page said the flag behind it was off for every server and nobody could turn it on themselves. Neither half was true. It is a toggle in Settings, Features, it has been yours to flip the whole time, and the page now says so.

The site stopped saying there are three versions of WoW in here

Retail has been a supported flavour since August and gained raids today, but the setup glossary, the site description, the how-it-works walkthrough, the LFG feature page and the guild activity toggle were all still counting to three. They count to four now, and the LFG page says plainly that PvP is not one of the things retail gets.

The web stopped handing retail raids a Classic costume

A thirty-man retail raid was given eight groups and forty seats, its expansion chips read retail_midnight rather than Midnight, the Edit Raid list offered it Karazhan, and the planner told a retail guild its buffs looked solid off a check that had never run, then warned it about a missing Windfury Totem on the public share page. All of it came from web keeping its own Classic-shaped copies of things the bot already knew. It reads from the same place the bot does now.

The raid wizard stopped offering sizes the difficulty cannot run

Picking Mythic used to leave a thirty-man button sitting there, which the server would then refuse. The size buttons follow the difficulty now, in the wizard and on the bot, and the flex range does the same instead of offering a spread a Mythic raid never had.

The web could set up a raid series out of thin air

Creating a series through the web wrote the raid type, the size and the difficulty straight from the request with nothing checked, and the scheduler then span raids off that row every week. Three other web routes had a softer version of the same hole. All four now hold a raid to a size and difficulty it can genuinely run at, using the same rule the bot uses rather than a second copy that would have drifted.

The retail LFG board stopped offering PvP it could not fill

Retail officers were shown a PvP option backed by a bracket list that only speaks Classic battlegrounds, so it could never have listed anything. Better to not be on the menu than to be on it and empty.

Raid art is checked before it is trusted

Blizzard will tell you a picture exists and then refuse to serve it. Six of them do exactly that, including all five Dire Maul and Stratholme wings, whose current art is hand-picked and works fine. Hootus now knocks on every image before he swaps one in, so a good picture never gets replaced by a broken one.