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So I could stay somewhere safe and just auto-forage all night while I sleep?
If you use these methods that involve tieing it to a key stroke or social macro, no, it won't work, since you still have to hit a button to get the action to work, you're just tieing it to a button that you use often (like left arrow or something) and/or making a series of commands with one keystroke using a social macro (ingame macros). This are legal, but you have to physically hit the button... now, you could just have one of those bobbing bird things hit the button over and over while you were /afk, but if a GM sends you a tell and you don't respond within a reasonable amount of time, they will remove you from the world and possibly threaten you with a banning.
This brings up the differences between "allowed" and "not allowed" macros. For the longest time, SOE said no macros other then social macros were allowed, especially no 3rd party software. Then, they decided it was ok for bards and rangers to use 3rd party software (primarly linked to gamepads like the Nostromo and Gravis) to allow them to do the repetitive motions of twisting and shooting arrows, since there was no /melody or auto ranged attack functions at the time. The caveat was that you had to be present at the keyboard still. No AFK macroing. They got into the habit of sending people (especially bards that were kiting a little "too" perfectly) a tell, just asking how they were doing. If you didn't answer after a couple of tells but kept doing your actions, they would assume you were afk macroing and "take action".
So this brings up the question on 3rd party software for "non-afk" actions (like twisting and ranged attack, amongst other things) since bards now have /melody and all classes can use auto ranged attack... I personally haven't seen any official word that gamepads aren't allowed anymore, and I don't forsee them announcing that either. Gamepads have become a large part of many people's playstyles, and it would only be detrimental to the player population to go back on that policy now.
The moral of the story is: if you're going to do anything very repetitive (practicing casting, foraging, begging, etc) it would behoove you to not to do it while /afk, and to answer any GM's tells ASAP. The two exceptions to this seems to be bard /afk instrument training and swimming. As long as you're not spamming people with AE DoTs, they tend to not care about that.
Edited, Tue Jan 18 14:04:53 2005 by Jiggidyjay