This game badly needs mods and macros.

Macros are needed IMO. Not the rift style 1 button wonder macros, more like the WoW style with sensible restrictions and conditional statements to test for reasonable states.

As for addons, I'm mostly against that. You get the situation with 3rd party addons that give rise to situations like the infamous gearscore of WoW, or you come to rely on an addon and when the author decides to discontinue support for it, it eventually breaks as the game progresses and the player is left to either revert to the default or have to adjust to a different mod. Along with version hell, addons can often be more of a headache than they are a benefit.

I think that Addons are a very important part of the MMO, mainly as they can add all sorts of wonderful new functionality to an already great game. As an avid addon user during my WoW days I would use them for all sorts of things, be they roleplay related, raiding, pvp or otherwise.

As for peoples concerns regarding horrific patch days when it comes to addons, or addons going out of date, well that's part of the risk you take on by using an addon, they are always optional nobody forces you to get an addon, so I don't see why people who don't want to use them are saying that they shouldn't be implemented.

NO.

Were getting by just nicely and the last thing we all need is the work being done for us. Star Wars is more special than all those other mmos.

That's a ridiculous argument, you DON'T HAVE TO USE ADDONS if you don't want to. So saying point blanc that they shouldn't be in the game is just a selfish argument.

Look in many games they made addons like the Gearscore addon for World of Warcraft. It caused so many people in the game to have to out of their way just to get into raids. It changes priorities. The only addons I would like to see are things like AtlasLoot or a different skin for my UI. If we're going to have addons make sure it's hard to code.

Not badly. It needs more story, legacy features and activities from the SW universe.

Signed
UI Mods and built in Macros

The macros do not have to be anything fancy, no ability to loop or call other macros.

Just a way you can assign a / command or two into a single button.

Like /target MOB; /use Rocket Jump

that short of thing would be awesome.

If BW does not want to allow UI mods, then they need to take a Loooooong hard look at other options that are out there for other games with similar MMO content. There are many amazing concepts that are 100% absent from SWTOR

Wow... so many posts. Has the thread(s) brought any real information/change in regard to the future of the UI situation? I just found this thread and hoping someone that has been following this could help me out, because who has time to read all the posts (especially if you count from the original thread).

From what I've read, there is a lot of debate about addons and macros, but I'm not looking to go into a debating session about them.... I would just like to know, seeing how popular this discussion has been, if we found out any concrete/official information regarding UI custimization, addons, and macros.

Besides that, I would like to point out something regarding this discussion so that we're clear... I think there are three distinct areas of discussion here that should be kept in mind; UI customization, addons, and macros.

'UI customization' (or whatever you want to call it).basically means, changing the current UI elements to look, and kind of behave, differently; without adding any new functionality that means 'less skill'. This is what I am looking for; although I like it when my life is made easier with addons. In other words, just vanilla customization of the UI so the layout, look and feel, best suites to what you like. Simplest examples would be to 'reskin' the UI so instead of having general blue tech theme, you can have a specific Imperial Sith theme. Mainly, I'm just talking about flexibility of current UI elements.

Addons would be the things that add extra features to the UI, that the current one doesn't provide and can be considered as creating an uneven playing field. Just off the top of my head from what I can think of in other MMOs, allowing you to see how much aggro, or damage, each person is making in an encounter (something the current UI doesn't allow you to do, AFAIK). Or placing markers on the map for all possible locations of resource nodes.

Just wanted to try and make that distinction just in case this discussion turns devs off of the idea to allow users more UI customization, because even though the interface editor setup is nice improvement (don't remember it being there in the beginning), there is still plenty to add for UI customization and I don't want that to be thrown out with addons. In other words, if the devs don't want to allow for addons, that's fine by me, but they should still go for opening up the UI customization more because as it comes down to it, I currently can't make the UI look the way I'd prefer.

Sorry for the long post.

^ This. The last thing SWTOR needs now are addons.

Once introduced, certain addons will quickly become mandatory and people who don't use them will find themselves in trouble if they want to get into groups. It would only serve to segregate parts of the playerbase.

Just saying, i would love to mods or addons, i mean, to have a healing macro or addons, for either raids, pve or pvp is extremely usefull. Since i play a sorcerer, people directly think i will be the healer, and in some cases i need to be, altho i wanna play it as dps.

Keybindings just isnt enough to do the job perfectly. Ive been a healer in WoW and other games, and when i heal, i heal perfectly, giving the group almost godmode like.

But in this game without mods and all that, healing has become alot harder to do, because sometimes when tank is in a fight and i try to select him, i end up selecting the boss and healing myself instead of the tank.

I vote for addons and mods most def.