How to migrate away from Arcane

Most moves off Arcane are about the same thing: it caps free role rewards at 15 and charges $75 a year to lift the cap. A server that has built a reward ladder hits that ceiling and has to decide between paying annually and moving.

Before you start: you need Manage Server and Manage Roles, and about an hour. Do not do this during an event.

Take the inventory first

Twenty minutes now saves a week of “where did my role go”.

Every role reward, with its level. Screenshot the list. This is the thing you are rebuilding and it is the thing nobody remembers accurately.

The XP configuration. Rate, cooldown, any multipliers, and which channels are excluded. Excluded channels in particular are invisible until someone farms XP in the bot-commands channel.

Level-up message settings — where it posts, whether it is on, the wording.

Any leaderboard or rank-card customisation you actually care about.

And the subscription state: what you pay, when it renews, and where to cancel it.

Move levels first

Member XP is the only part that cannot be rebuilt by hand. Everything else on this page is configuration you can retype; XP is months of accumulated member activity, and if it is lost the migration is visible to every member simultaneously.

So it moves first, before anything else is configured, and the rest of the migration waits on it succeeding.

Check what the destination supports before removing anything. Import paths between levelling bots exist but vary — some accept a file, some read the source bot directly, some do not import at all. Confirm the route works on your data rather than on a documentation page.

If no import path exists, the honest options are: accept a reset and announce it clearly in advance, or run both bots in parallel while new XP accumulates on the new one and the old ranks stay readable during a transition period.

Announce a reset before it happens, not after. Members treat levels as earned, and discovering a reset without warning is the part of a migration that costs members.

Rebuild the reward ladder in ascending order

Once levels have moved, recreate the role rewards from the lowest level upward.

The reason is mechanical: as each reward is created, members who already qualify receive it. Building downward means a member qualifying for four rewards receives them in a scattered order and may get several role-grant notifications; building upward gives the same result in a predictable sequence.

Check the bot’s role position before you start. A role-granting bot must sit above every role it hands out, and this is the single most common reason a freshly-configured reward ladder appears not to work. See role hierarchy.

Vetox’s rank rewards have no cap — the 15-reward ceiling that prompted the move does not exist — and levelling with text and voice XP is on the free Starter tier. Its rewards are also re-evaluated on every XP award rather than only at the moment a threshold is crossed, which is useful here: a member who was owed a role during the migration window receives it automatically on their next message, with nothing to reset by hand.

Then the rest, in dependency order

XP configuration — rate, cooldown, multipliers, excluded channels. Do the exclusions before you announce the switch, or the first hour produces a leaderboard full of bot-command spam.

Level-up messages — where they post and what they say.

Anything downstream of levels: channels gated behind a level role, self-role panels that reference them, welcome messages pointing at them.

Remove Arcane last

Only after the replacement has run for a few days and the leaderboard looks correct.

Roles Arcane already granted stay on members. Discord does not revoke roles when a bot leaves, so removing it does not strip anyone. Only future grants are affected, which is why running both in parallel is safe.

Then cancel the subscription separately. Removing the bot from the server does not stop the billing — that is a separate action on the vendor’s own billing page, and it is the step most people miss. Do it the same day, not “later”.

What you gain by moving

Worth being concrete, since the migration costs an hour.

No reward cap. The ladder can be as long as the community warrants rather than 15 entries.

Levelling free on Starter, with text and voice XP, per-guild exclusions and level-up messages.

And the systems around it on the same dashboard: XP events for a double-XP weekend, streaks for daily rhythm, a battle pass for a seasonal frame, and 40 games — with a 90-day record of who changed which module, free on every tier, which is genuinely useful in the week after a migration when somebody asks why a setting is different.

Verify it worked

Four checks, and the fourth is the one people skip.

Compare the leaderboard top twenty against a screenshot of the old one. Order matters more than exact numbers.

Check a mid-level member, not just the top. Import problems frequently affect the long tail rather than the visible few.

Confirm role rewards fire by checking a member who should hold three and does.

Post in an excluded channel and confirm no XP is awarded. Exclusions are the setting most often lost in a migration, and the symptom — a leaderboard slowly filling with people who post in bot-commands — takes weeks to notice.

Frequently asked questions

Why do people move off Arcane? Its free tier caps role rewards at 15 and lifting the cap costs $75 a year.

Will members lose their roles when I remove the bot? No. Discord does not revoke roles a bot granted; only future grants stop.

Does removing the bot cancel the subscription? No — cancelling is a separate step on the vendor’s billing page.

In what order should role rewards be rebuilt? Ascending by level, so members who already qualify receive them predictably.

What cannot be rebuilt by hand? Member XP. Everything else is configuration you can retype, which is why levels move first.