THIS HAS TO END

[Alhanelem]

The difference is that you actually have to be at the PC to press the macro to yell.

If you think this never happens, well, it does happen. People manually use /yell and /shout macros all the time for recruitment or trying to buy/sell stuff. Multitasking is a thing. Press your chat marco, tab to web browser, tab back to game and press it again. Of course, 15+ years ago it wasn't possible. So at least they eventually let us window the game without tools.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't WoW officially support add-ons? If so, that's a completely disingenuous comparison.

"officially support" in the sense that it's not a TOS violation. But their GMs nor tech support will help you if it breaks anything. Which it absolutely can.

I just really don't like the whole holier-than-thou vibe I got from your comments on this subject. Maybe that really isn't your intent, but that's how it came off to me. But at least you can draw a distinction from outright cheating (i.e. cheatengine) and quality-of-life / accessibility improvements. and I think SE looks at these things in context (and considers spirit and not just letter of the rule) as well.

FFXIV does this as well. The producer himself has gone on the record saying he doesn't have much of an issue with people using things like parsers or stat tracking for self improvement, even though it's *technically* against the TOS. They generally only take action if such tools are used to harass/harm others i.e. being toxic towards another player for putting out lower DPS than you'd like)

Originally, FFXIV was going to allow UI modding (and the built in UI is built with LUA script), but they ended up just investing their energy in continually improving and expanding the flexibility of the UI, which is vastly more customizable than WoW's built in UI.

This is something that the FFXI devs never handled very well, which is why UI mod tools exist. If they actually listened to the feedback back in the day (and/or actually implemented the New UI they started but never finished), most of the people who use those things probably wouldn't find them necessary.

But it's too late for that now. UI improvements would likely require too much dev time and would compromise the release of new content. I wish I could time warp back to when we had the test server, got more people to try it and convince SE se to have kept working on it.

Anyway, that's enough rambling from me. I probably overreacted and I'm sorry for that.