The easiest ones to understand are the extortionists: "pay me and I'll go away" is not an uncommon tactic.

I think the rise of streamers and Internet personalities has incentivized many present day cheaters. You're more likely to strike it big—become popular, get paid—if you're good at these games. There is no shortage of YouTube videos showing streamers getting caught on stream cheating.

In team fortress 2, players can receive loot boxes/in game items during normal gameplay. The loot boxes can be unlocked by purchasing a "key" for ~$2.50, to receive cosmetic items. Many of the cosmetic items can sell for a lot, on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

The cosmetic items from loot boxes (as well as those attained from normal play) can then be sold in online markets (such as scrap.tf or marketplace.tf) for real-world currency.

This is probably what the primary goal of the bots is. Ironically, the source of TF2's profit for Valve (microtransactions for cosmetics) is also a partial cause for the bot crisis.

I did it very briefly as a teenager. It was fun to spend hundreds of hours struggle bussing at a game, trying super hard, still being mediocre, to suddenly having god-like powers and mowing everyone down. It wasn't about my ego or feeling superior, it was just mechanically fun in the same way it's fun in battlefield to be in a tank hunting down people on feet.

Really? It seems obvious to me.

Many people enjoy feeling superior to others, and have zero qualms about behaving immorally or against the rules. Some even get off on it and enjoy the challenge.

We see this behavior everywhere in real life as well, but it's much easier to achieve in a virtual setting. Whether that's by harassing someone verbally, or winning in a game by cheating, it triggers the same pleasure receptors for these people.

A psychologist could explain this better, and I'm sure this has been studied thoroughly.

I understand the ones that stay on cheated servers. There have been CS servers in the past that made it unequivocally clear you only belong there for cheating, and it was a literal duel against cheat client configs - I've heard it was a lot of fun.

I used to cheat when I had free time as a kid. It is fun to figure something out/do something against the rules, but it does quickly become boring.

I don't think I'd waste my time on something like that today, though.

Back in my youth I used to write farm bots for f2p asia MMORPGS with a friend. And it was basically just one more programming problem to solve. We just did it for the sake of the challenge.

While I lost interest after leveling up a few characters over night and letting the bot farm, my friend kept on working on them to make them better and sell them for little money. After all we were still in school and he made some good money with it. I'd assume that's the point for most cheat devs. Just doing it to show it could be done. Those people that annoyingly use the bots are just laughing their asses off while using them. Schadenfreude is a thing, you know?

Really? I don’t think it’s substantially different to the psychology of cheating in any other field, whether that’s drugs in sport or tax fraud.

In gaming, cheating is an opportunity to LARP as a better player. Gaming identities are often anonymous, cheat tools are widely available, and the prevalence of anti-cheat implies that “lots of other people are doing it” which gives some personality types sufficient moral cover.

It’s refusing to accept the limitations others place on you. Anything else would be seen as un-American and unacceptable in my state.

According to xkcd there’s 10,000 potential new cheating teenagers every day. It’s just inevitable