Yeah, writing a piece of software that communicates and passes data over the internet is impossi..... OH **** WAIT A SECOND.

Third party parsers will eventually communicate with each other for real-time group parsing.

The only people that a harm/help macro will effect on a constant basis are healers in PvP. You said that yourself earlier in the thread (or someone with a similar viewpoint to you did, I can't remember). Furthermore, target enemy and target friendly NPCs are separate buttons and while you might get the wrong target, the same is true any time you need to change target at all.

Difficulty of the game is not a reason to reduce the functionality of the UI. The UI should be as approachable, customisable, FUNCTIONAL as it possibly can be, and then balance the game. Difficulty that is derived from UI interaction is arbitrary and not at all fun. It's like saying a car race down a straight road is too easy... let's take away the steering wheel to make it more challenging. Well no, that's not the way to improve the race - make the track more interesting, don't hamstring the car.

Elmiond, your arguments just don't make sense to anyone thinking rationally without bias. If you have less discrete buttons you have less chance that your fingers will have to move, less muscle memory mistakes, and therefore less errors. Hitting the wrong keys comes from two sources - decision making error, and muscle memory error. Less keys reduces the latter. Yes, having multiple contextual abilities on one key is still prone to decision error, but going from one ability to the next if you have both on one key is not prone to muscle error, since there is no movement to be made. You can make all the subjective statements you like about how you don't make mistakes and blah blah, but they really don't lend any weight to anyone thinking rationally. People do make mistakes when typing, it's as simple as that - otherwise we wouldn't have the backspace and delete keys.

Regardless of what they have or haven't done, macro-capable hardware is all reliant on software driving it. Software that enables macro behavior is very, very clearly against the terms of service. As an example, my steelseries xai has only the two normal buttons, the mousewheel, a dpi button, and 4 extra buttons. Two of those 4 buttons will simply not work without binding them to a key on the keyboard using the software that comes with the mouse - this is already a macro. However, the software inextricably also allows functioning recorded macros with timed button presses and all kinds of other things. This mouse will not function properly without using this piece of software. If they detect me using the software and ban me, it could simply be because I want to actually use my buttons on my mouse. If they choose not to ban me, they could be allowing me to get away with all kinds of in game macros. This is a very simple example, my mouse has very limited buttons; the software for mice with 15+ buttons and G series keyboards allows for a huge degree more macro capability, and effectively functions to the same degree as any third party macro software. Unless they can see what you are specifically DOING with the software that came with your hardware, they cannot tell whether you are macroing or not (hot tip: they can't). If they make specific exceptions for specific pieces of software, they are essentially allowing a practice that they have defined as cheating to be allowed only for those people who buy those pieces of hardware that are specifically allowed. It is an absolutely unwinnable battle - like I said 20 pages ago and again 40 pages ago, fighting against macros is fighting to hold yourself at a disadvantage. They cannot remove macros without blanket banning anyone using gaming hardware of any kind, and people will not stop macroing unless they do. Any comment from EA/Bioware regarding the spread of macro usage is effectively guesswork and politics, because they cannot possibly know who is macroing and who isn't, only possibly know if the software that can allow macros is running on someone's pc (and I am not even sure if they do that - is there a warden-esk program running behind swtor?) I'm trying to TL;DR the subject, but it's a bit hard to do: Bioware has just said they won't allow something that people are already doing to a vast degree, that they can't detect, and that they can't do anything about even if they can detect it. Any attempt to downplay the topic by Bioware can effectively be laughed at as a meagre PR tact, and any action besides one of developing in game macro support will have no effect whatsoever. By delaying the development of in-game macros Bioware is doing MORE damage to the game, by allowing more people the opportunity and desire to search for third party solutions.

No, I have limitations leveling without a healer that I don't have leveling with one. Trying to say otherwise is flat out lying, lol. You can pull more, and you can pull faster, with a healer npc rather than a DPS npc. Your aoe capabilities on most classes drastically outweigh any dps companion, and AoE efficiency drastically outweighs single target for practically every ac. It's not a difficult concept. There are a few ACs that can safely use a dps companion and still aoe like crazy, mostly because of their ridiculous defensive capabilities in dps specs; sorcerer/sages, for example, can live behind the relative safety of their bubble which can be cast proactively. The vast majority lose efficiency by having to heal post combat, especially melee classes who cannot effectively burn melee enemies before being hit.

It is. Quite simply, the more discrete physical keybinds you have, the less likely your fingers are to be near where they want to be for any given key press. Given you control the keyboard with your left hand, your pinky is probably responsible for very few keys, so alt-q isn't the strongest argument to make. However, given you have a large number of keybinds, it is much more likely that your point of origin was on a different modifying key or any particular finger is further from the key you are aiming for. It's pretty simple really; less discrete choices means less travel time and less muscle-memory that needs to be accessed and applied in coordination with other combinations. You are trying to argue that context-driven decision making is equally prone to mistake when compared with physical difficulty, and it's not. Ad hominem attacks don't strengthen your argument.

There is no point replying to a person who says they can outplay someone using macros without them, because they simply don't understand the concept of what they can do. Ultimately how you play with macros can only be compared to how you play without them; how you play compared with other players makes no difference. There is not a person on earth who can play better without macros than with, given equal opportunity to learn each system. It's like saying "I can dial an 8 digit phone number faster than I can press memory 2" - it simply isn't rational.

I won't because such solutions are clearly against the rules of conduct, but needless to say there are a huge number of people for whom enjoyment of the game necessitates such use, and for whom being banned for doing such is a worthwhile risk, since playing without them is not enjoyable anyway. Hardware solutions are equally bannable under the rules of conduct, since they all require a software intermediary to make their macros function. Google has your answers.

There are a plethora of software macro options you can use in the place of a hardware solution.

Yay, you can safely be ignored. I have 5 50s too; using a healer companion is as fast, and far more safe, when compared with using a dps companion.

I am going to repost this post I made from 20 pages ago, because it is absolutely outstanding the number of people who are still posting as if they think people aren't using an abundance of macros in SWTOR already. Players who want to excel at SWTOR use macros. They ALREADY DO SO. You are not fighting against a feature that has not yet been implemented, people already use extensive macroing in THIS GAME that you claim is cleaner for their lack of existence. By fighting against an official macro system within the game, you are fighting to keep yourself at a disadvantage, and fighting to force those people who realise that macros are vital to maintain peak performance to keep looking at third party options which offer infinitely more options than any in game version would do. Lets reiterate one more time in big font. If you are fighting macros under the presumption that people are not already using them, and will continue to use them for the lifespan of the game, you are fighting to keep yourself disadvantaged.

Unless you never rest, it's not. Also, there is absolutely no way that the companion is doing 75% of your dps, especially if you are aoeing a lot, which you should be. There are no dps charts to look either way, but look at the damage numbers of their abilities and their cooldowns, and you will see that they are severely lower than your own even with up to date gear. Healing companions still do some damage, but they also entirely mitigate downtime between mobs.

Leveling as a healer is ridiculously slow - it's not even the same ballpark. This is especially true given how powerful healing companions are compared with others - DPS companions do comparatively weak damage, while the healers only need to do "enough" healing to keep you alive, which they do. Healing is zero sum, while dps is uncapped.