Guild Wars 2

The following question has be asked to ArenaNet by e-mail, but the response was that I should use my own judgment based on the rules stated by Gaile on these forums. However, I cannot decide and so I am asking you, my fellow players, these questions:

-Is it allowed to make a macro that does a chat emote through the press of a single button?

-Is it allowed to make a macro that makes a button act as a doubleclick (i.e. instead of pressing 4 twice to make Magnetic Shield trigger, make a single button press act as if I pressed the button twice)?

-Is it allowed to pre-program a song for the ingame music instruments (given that they in no way provide any benefit and are for entertainment purposes only)?

Their stance is one button, one action.

So, taking their stance literally, all three of your examples would be disallowed because they all perform more than one action per button/keystroke.

The second one might get you banned quicker than the other two though because it would give you a distinct advantage. The other two examples don’t really give you an advantage, but use them at your own risk.

Yeah, I feared I might get an answer like that. Thing is, I can’t really see any of the macros as a true player advantage. The second may indeed be close to a gameplay advantage, but if the delay were similar to a player pressing a key twice, the net gain would be 0. However, given ArenaNet’s strict policy I don’t want to risk it.

Thanks for answering my question.

Whilst it is technically against the rules I can’t seriously see them banning you for using a macro to play songs. As long as it is actually playing a song – some people have been banned (or at least temporarily suspended) because they used a macro to play one or two notes over and over again for long periods of time in heavily populated areas – which even with the player instrument volume controls qualifies as griefing.

Likewise while making one for a chat emote is technically against the rules I can’t see them taking action on it because it doesn’t give you any actual advantage. Except maybe once a year when playing Mad King Says.

Setting a key to press twice to save you having to do as much in combat is definitely against the rules though. It’s a relatively minor example but any kind of automated combat (beyond the existing auto-attack) is exactly what this rule is in place to prevent.