Oddly enough this was one of the coolest bits in Star Wars Galaxies when I first started playing, the developers GAVE us the ability to have IN GAME macros, no third party crap or special keyboards required. In the simplest form, macros where nothing less than a simple way to take out repetitive key-pressing out of active game play which for some professions meant that you could simply focus on being social, and chat with your friends.
Case in point – Entertainer Professions, very much needed to heal head wounds and battle fatigue, in order to heal though the characters needed to dance or play music and issue various flourish commands repeatedly — initially to gain experience and eventually to buff/heal other characters. Imagine sitting for hours at the keyboard and pressing 8 keys every minute AND attempting to carry on conversations with other players or guild mates. Also Doctors, not only at the buff lines shouting the power/duration/cost of buffs so other players knew which line to jump into, or apply the buffs and NOT miss a pack, with a little bit of time allowed for lag ( which in some locations was always requiring changes especially close to shuttles/spaceports ).
Then the odd part, macro’s where for some a reason people would accuse you of exploiting — because your strikes where timed and hit where their key mash missed a command in the combat queue OR lag delayed/changed the order, whatever the deal key mashing for combat was definitely NOT the way to go if the order of what you wanted to land mattered. Consequently, someone who key mashed and didn’t bother to learn the commands or how to macro would accuse a player executing macros as exploiting. IDIOTS! Learn the game mechanics, take a look at what the developers provided, and figure out how to use them to the best end.
I remember one of the first nights my roommate and I where messing around with some crazy ideas, we zoomed the characters fields of view out, set the camera on spin, set up one macro that rotated targets and would follow the closest target for a duration of time. This caused the character to run towards the target. So there was the extent of the first macro, rotate target and follow, then call itself and loop. Next macro engage in combat with whatever set of strikes where necessary. Next macro loot/harvest resources. While not totally efficient as at the keyboard play, this simple concept allowed us to make an unreasonable amount of credits, resources, faction, and level our characters up without numbing our minds.
Now admittedly it required work to make macro’s that could be combined and tweaking them ( and aliases ) for that matter where guarded secrets typically except for really simple items as the publicly available documentation of the commands was not great. So either trial and error, or testing was required. There where some people I’m aware of that would spend hours testing strikes after a new publish landed before heading out to PVP to see if what they had worked the same or if there where indeed better combinations to employ. Typically this involved looking at the combat spam window to see the damage landing, rate of critical hits and trying things numerous times to ensure the best possible outcome. Then retool your strike bar to spool up the most beneficial outcome for the characters template.
What macro’s did NOT do, provide the ability to actually perform logical CHANGES in a characters actions, i.e. no if statements, no arrays, things that third party tools may have actually allowed ( and those, according to the eula, where DEFINITELY exploits ) In fact I cannot think of a game that allows the use of third party tools.