It's an iffy topic. If you have good imagination, you can create pretty useful macros loading off big chunk of things that require to pay attention. Also to fire stuff like AC/2 at specific speed, turning it to literally RAC, you need to have it bound to several control groups into chainfire and have pretty agile fingers, while you can achieve same thing with marcos with single button click/hold.
Fire Control program is in free share, and anyone can use that. It will help players that run specific builds to create functionality that game have poorly implemented (TAG toggle/varying chainfire speed for specific weapon systems, etc). Load off some clicking work, and even regulate heat management at some extent without need to pay extra attention. It also can help great deal to disabled players, that cannot input specific commands.
Yes, it can give you an edge over other players, but not dramatic one, and only on very specific builds. Macros has a bad rep mainly from online shooters, where player can setup macro so, that his semi-auto weapon shoots in very accurate manner, literally in auto-mode, or make automatic weapons shoot in full-auto mode without any spread and recoil at all. MWO doesn't have these, thus macros isn't officially banned.
Another weird and funny example would be fighting games on PC. As players could setup pretty strong combos, that even pros struggle to pull off with perfect timing with pressing only one button on keyboard. If anyone played Mortal Kombat 9 on PC f.e., may know what I'm talking about, and yes, this is dirty cheating.
But as things stand, banning macros is literally impossible. For example, in Mortal Kombat X devs somehow coded for input not to recognize any macros software (I tried several for gigs), which is very good measure. But on client side, for most anti-cheat software it is very hard, to the point of impossible, to detect if someone uses macros or not, so shooters on PC get pretty cancerous in that manner. However, I wouldn't be overinflating issue regarding MWO, as currently, macros really do not provide players so unfair tools, to call it cheating in good consciousness.
Edited by Dragonporn, 12 October 2018 - 11:52 AM.