The first time you try a conditional, it will print out in chat if it is valid or not. Invalid conditionals are simply ignored.
[03:38:08] Unknown macro option: buff
The macro seems to be targeting those without echo because the /targetfriend command is cycling to a new friendly target before the /cast echo, but it is not checking if any buff is applied as that’s not something a macro can do.
thank you understood
Thats probably also because they might rather people try to steer as clear as possible from breaking the rule then doing stuff thats boarderline against the rules.
That’s not a good feeling to create in a large social group. It produces fear, and widespread fear across a large social group is something that creates behavior like racism, sexism, and other unhealthy social ills. When people are afraid, their mind goes into high gear to filter for threats. The threats are always assessed as the “other” so it depends on the group, but it produces out-group hatred at racism-levels.
For example, fear in non-competitive content. If it’s blamed on competitive players because they’ve advocated for something that hurts non-competitive players, it would become hate/racism-level fear of anyone playing competitively and cause activism to exile/eliminate competitive players from the game environment. This would be incredibly unhealthy. It’s essentially a race war, except instead of arguing over race they’re arguing over whether competition should exist.
I think your overthinking it. Its well established that macros are generally allowed so long as one is not spamming chats. It mostly comes down to use common sense. If you have to ask if something is against the rules then its probably too risky to attempt.
I may be overthinking it, it’s certainly possible.
I interact with a wide range of people who all have different levels of comfort with ambiguity. Being overly specific is bad, and being overly general is also bad. There’s a happy middle ground, but I know that’s hard to reach with a lawyer in the room.
Something that can help to easily confirm if something is against the rules or not is to look up what other people are saying about it. If people are reporting getting in trouble for said thing then you know its against the rules. In the case of the OP, there are many people using Macros like this. If this was getting people in trouble, there would be plenty of discussion confirming this.
I hesitate to say anything that can be done via macro is always fine since there was that time in Dragonflight where ClearTarget() was able to be called inside unsecure scripts despite being a protected function, basically allowing people to make an unjukable kickbot. That one time aside, macros are generally not going to let you into exploitable territory and anything you can do is probably going to be fine.
This is why you shouldn’t use AI for anything regarding games.
/targetfriend does work, but it’s really bad. Essentially tab-targeting through allies but only if they are in front of you.
Anyone doing arenas will target specific partymember #s because this command is totally useless.
A macro that screams obscenities and death threats is breaking the rules. An addon that causes anyone running it to mail 50k gold to the author every time they open a mailbox is breaking the rules. That’s not saying that addons or macros are the root problem, doing something very, very obviously outside the bounds is.
The only bannable thing that I think is questionable is mouse software key sequences / AHK. If the game detects these, it should give a clear warning that they’re not allowed. A tech-illiterate person may not even know those are running.