Evidence that Macros Do NOT Cause GCD Delay or Lost Casts

[LilimoLimomo]

If Macros is so good, as OP is making an argument for, curious why we haven't seen a bigger adoption outside of some niche cases the past decade?

Not sure if I'm a normie and just use it for certain abilities/skills and for DoH/L.

According to the folks in this thread who are familiar with the Japanese scene, it sounds like macros see normal use over there. Which suggests to me that the difference in adoption isn't a technical one, but a social one.

That being the case, my best guess is that the difference maker is that prominent voices in the English-speaking community have long discouraged macro use, saying that it will result in lower APM. And people have trusted those sources and adjusted their behavior accordingly.

[Mikoko_Miko]

According to the folks in this thread who are familiar with the Japanese scene, it sounds like macros see normal use over there. Which suggests to me that the difference in adoption isn't a technical one, but a social one.

That being the case, my best guess is that the difference maker is that prominent voices in the English-speaking community have long discouraged macro use, saying that it will result in lower APM. And people have trusted those sources and adjusted their behavior accordingly.

There are opinions such as "don't using macros" also in JP community. But there are more counters than in EN community. I found another opinion in earlier post. It is likely that avoiding macro is believed to be capable of mitigating ping issues.

It's worth mentioning that JP players will naturally have less aversion to macros because JP ping is way lower than the average NA/EU player, and at lower pings the need for queueing up abilities as a way to mitigate ping issues is reduced. This isn't some secret JP knowledge that NA/EU players are just too dumb to realize, it's just that our play environments are very different ping-wise.

I tried DC traveling to Oceania and experienced ping issues. When I weave oGCD macros, surely it tend to cause a clipping. But I don't think the root of the problem is a macro. High ping affected both normal actions and macros. I found normal actions and pseudo-queueing macros almost equivalent except window size. The difference between actions and macros seems irrelevant to ping issues. Macrology text and threads on ping issues support my view.

Quoted from Macrology

Local Processing

Macro and text command instead player's operation. All these will change to a same form in system. All player's operation is local, so macro and text command are also local. They will be executed at once no matter how poor your network connection is.

You may feel disagree with this, for when network connection is poor, macro works not well. This is actually because macro is running as before, but connection with server is not as before. When you use a crafting macro, some actions missing if network connection is poor, this not because macro are influenced by network connection, but macro execute its commands as usual while character cannot receive commands due to poor network connection.

Animation lock is ping-dependent, as time spent before the server response is ignore
Total cast time of actions is affected by connection speed in an unintended way