A Fourth Game, And The Part It Cannot Do

Retail is a game Hootus speaks now

Pick it in setup alongside Classic Era, TBC and MoP. All thirteen classes and forty specs, Demon Hunter and Evoker included, twenty-five races, the live realm list, and gear and item level off the armoury. Roster sync, verification and member tracking work the same as they do on Classic. Raid planning does not, and that is not a soft no: there is no retail raid content in Hootus at all, so a retail-only guild gets a roster tool and no raid post, no planner, no lockout timer. If you already run MoP or TBC and add retail, your raids carry on untouched.

A page that says what retail does, and what it does not

`/retail` lists what works today, what is built but switched off, and the raid gap, in that order and without burying the last one. Every number on it comes from a real run against a live retail guild rather than a rounded-up guess. No date for retail raids appears anywhere, because there is not one. When there is, it will be in this changelog, not promised on a marketing page.

A guild rename is settled by Blizzard's guild id, not by the name

When your guild's name changes, Hootus had to work out whether everyone had left or the sign over the door had been repainted, and he did it by fetching the other guild's roster and counting how many names overlapped. Blizzard hands him the guild's own id, which does not change when the name does, so he uses that first and only falls back to counting heads when there is no id to read. Fewer wrong guesses, and one less round trip on every rename.

The realm list had not been refreshed since the fifth of August

Hootus re-reads Blizzard's realm list every day so new and renamed realms turn up on their own. He had been throwing on that job every single day since the first time it ran, and swallowing the error, so the list you were picking realms from was twenty-two days old and quietly getting older. It refreshes again. Nothing you did caused it and nothing you have to do fixes it.

Removing your last realm no longer stops the roster sync

Take the last realm off in settings and Hootus had nowhere left to look, so he stopped syncing your roster and never said so. The page saved, the chip vanished, and the roster simply went stale. He now refuses to save an empty realm list and tells you why, because the alternative was a guild wondering for a week why nobody's level was updating.

A realm with a hyphen in its name no longer says yes and then no

Realms like Arak-arahm, Azjol-Nerub and Ra-den were being matched two different ways depending on whether Hootus read the name or the slug, so setup could tell you a guild was free to claim and then refuse you at the last step. He reads both the same way now. It only ever bit a guild that genuinely was claimed on another server, which made it a confusing five minutes rather than a lost one.

Removing Hootus and adding him back no longer hands you someone else's guild

When a server dropped Hootus and his data was cleaned up, the link to the WoW guild he had been watching was left behind. Add him to that server again and he could pick the old link back up and start pulling a guild you had never heard of into your roster. The link goes with everything else now, and a fresh install starts genuinely fresh.