MEE6 runs the server. Hootus runs raid night.
MEE6 is a general community bot: moderation, levels, welcome flows, reaction roles, and a long list of plugins beside them. Hootus is a WoW Classic guild bot and nothing else. This page is about the one place they meet, and about the four jobs MEE6 does that Hootus will not touch.
Different category, not a better version of the same thing.
Look at MEE6's own plugin catalogue and the shape is clear: moderation, levels, welcome and goodbye, custom commands, reaction roles, polls, giveaways, invite tracking, social alerts, economy. It is built to run a community. Enormous numbers of servers use it for exactly that, including plenty of WoW guilds.
Hootus is built to run a WoW Classic guild. Verification against the Blizzard armory, signups that know a Druid from a Mage, attendance off raid voice, loot fairness, recruitment, the pickup-raider lifecycle. He has no automod, no XP, no custom commands, and no intention of growing any. Install both and neither one is in the other's way.
Four places a community bot runs out of road.
Not criticism of MEE6. These are questions about characters, rosters and raid nights, which is a different product category with a different set of problems.
- The class role
A click says Mage. The armory says Warlock.
Reaction roles are how most guilds let members colour their own name, and they work fine on day one. They just record what someone typed. Hootus reads the class off the character the member verified against the Blizzard armory and keeps the role in step with it, so the member list and the raid roster stop disagreeing halfway through a tier.
- The roster
Your member list is not your guild roster
Discord knows about accounts. Hootus pulls the actual guild roster from Blizzard on an hourly default, matches characters to members, and notices when someone quietly leaves the in-game guild while still sitting in your Discord. Alts and respecs land in the same pass.
- Raid night
Signups that turn down a Mage clicking tank
One command posts the night. Every Tank, Healer or DPS click is checked against the class and spec of the character behind it, the composition updates live, and the drag-and-drop planner refuses an invalid drop before it lands. Your softres.it link rides along to the signup embed, the reminder and the lock DM.
- Afterwards
Attendance nobody had to count
Raiders join raid voice and the check-in lands with a timestamp. Gargul loot logs import on top of it, and the analytics line up items won against raids attended, main spec split from off spec. That is the argument in #officer-chat, settled with data instead of memory.
Levels measure chat. Attendance measures Tuesday.
A levelling system rewards people for talking, and that genuinely keeps a Discord alive. It is the reason MEE6 is on as many servers as it is, and it is a real job Hootus does not do.
It is also not the number an officer needs when a trial is up for promotion or when loot council is deciding who has waited long enough. Hootus takes attendance off raid voice with a timestamp and puts it next to items won, main spec split from off spec.
Attendance comes from the raid voice channel, not from reactions on a post, so nobody is auditing who clicked what after the fact.
Category against category.
The left column is what a general community bot is for. It is deliberately not a list of things MEE6 cannot do, because that list would be wrong within a month. The right column is verified against what Hootus ships today.
- Moderation, filters and automod on the chat
- Levels and XP to reward people for being active
- Welcome flows, custom commands, polls, giveaways
- Reaction roles, so members pick their own class
- Works for any server, any game, any hobby
- Class role derived from a verified armory character
- Guild roster pulled from Blizzard, hourly by default
- Signups validated against class and spec
- Attendance taken from raid voice, with timestamps
- Loot logs from Gargul, and who is overdue an item
- Recruitment queue, PUG lifecycle, officer dashboard
- Classic Era, TBC Classic Anniversary and MoP Classic only
The overlap is one row. Both bots can put a class role on a member. MEE6 does it from a reaction, which records a claim. Hootus does it from the character verified on the armory, which records a fact. Same coloured name in the member list, one of them had to be earned.
Four jobs where Hootus is not the answer.
Switching is not the point of this page. Most guilds should be running a general community bot and a WoW bot side by side, and the general one is doing work that matters.
So here is the plain version, rather than a paragraph of hedging at the bottom of the page.
- Your server needs moderating. Hootus does not read messages for spam, has no word filters, and is not an anti-raid bot. That is not a gap he plans to close.
- You want XP, levels and leaderboards. Engagement mechanics are a real reason people stay in a Discord, and MEE6 built its name on them. Hootus has nothing of the sort.
- The server is a community that happens to raid. Welcome flows, giveaways, polls, custom commands and social alerts serve a talking server better than a bot that only knows raid logistics.
- You are not on WoW Classic. Three flavours, Classic Era, TBC Classic Anniversary and MoP Classic, and nothing else. Retail, other games and multi-game servers are the wrong fit and always will be.
The WoW-native parts are free.
MEE6 sells a paid tier and is entitled to. Big general bots carry big bills. Check their own page for current prices, because those move.
- Classic flavours supported
- 3Classic flavours supported
- Default roster sync interval
- 1hDefault roster sync interval
- Administrator asked for at install
- 0Administrator asked for at install
Hootus draws the line somewhere else. Verification, the roster sync, signups, the planner, attendance, loot logs and recruitment are free at the core and stay that way. There is nothing to buy today. If a paid layer ever lands it covers heavy extras, clearly drawn, never raid night.
What keeping the bot online costsKeep MEE6. Add the bot that knows what a Mage is.
Armory verification, class roles that follow the character, signups validated against class and spec, attendance from raid voice, loot fairness and recruitment. Five minutes to set up, no config files, and nothing to uninstall first.