There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.
It still feels like a game in the sense that there's progression and rewards for progression. For example, learning how to read cooldowns means you can make smarter macros and double your income / cut kill time by half. There's even different "build paths" in that you can choose to go the memory reading build (fragile but reliable), network sniffing build (less fragile but expensive), or computer vision build (easy but unreliable and expensive).
From a technical perspective, the appeal is having an excuse to try out new stuff like SAT solvers, rules engines, or whatever ML thing I just learned about. It's also a good exercise in all the math and data structures + algos stuff I've learned but never use at dayjob. Optionally, building a UI to manage the bot is fun for the same reasons, an excuse to try out new frameworks / design choices / etc. It's basically another programming job but without the icky business / customer considerations.
Though I do agree that cheats in any PvP scenario is pretty lame. It has a much bigger negative impact on other players, and it's not as much of a puzzle (mostly aimbot and pathing). In comparison, PvE games are usually social and unless you're running a swarm of VMs, you're unlikely to affect the economy or otherwise inconvenience anyone.
I also maintained a browser addon for a while that had 100k+ weekly active users that added various features to a browser-based game. Eventually that game had such bad problems with botting and cheating that they had to introduce an anti-cheat system, and we basically got into a little arms race for a year or so where they'd add a new detection system and I'd circumvent it. Similar to the EVE Online modding it was things like workarounds for bugs in the game, improved UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc. Eventually they drew a line in the sand and said anyone using addons of any kind would get a permanent ban, so that was that.
I think the vast majority of cheaters are just in it to ruin other people's fun but sometimes people are violating ToS for a better or different experience with the game. It's unfortunate that the prevalence of malicious cheating means that anti-cheat technology also has to basically ban modding for fun.
I won't say it was better back in the 90s/ early 2000s but games had lobbies and people would just naturally drift around until they found one that satisfied their needs, be it playing more causally or for a more hardcore experience. Nowadays matchmaking is all controlled by the almighty algorithm which is just a glorified ELO/MMR system and dumps people together regardless of whether or not the game is "fun" for them. Worse yet "Quitting" is actively punished so you just have to stay in the game being frustrated and angry at your teammates until you lose. I always use pick up basketball as an example of how lobbies should work with people being given the choice of playing until they are tired/bored and punish trolls by excluding them forcing them to seek out another court or just start their own games.
Now that i have sworn off all competitive multiplayer games because i used to be a real fiend with several thousand hours in Dota 2 i have come to realize that as fun as the game is the fundamental failure of every matchmaking system is that your fun will always be dictated by how often you win because that's the only thing that is rewarded both in the game and by the community. If you look at any forum for these competitive games it's always the same complaints with people bemoaning that the balances is bad (AKA i don't win because if i did why would i complain), the game is too hard for newbies (AKA i don't win because the skill level is too high), and that the community is too toxic (AKA i don't win because i don't take the game too seriously and people get mad at me).
I'm much happier playing singleplayer games or exclusively cooperative games like Helldivers and Deep Rock Galactic and think most people would be too but they need to come to the realization that it's not the games fault per se but the underlying mechanics behind the matchmaking systems.
Matchmaking is designed so that you win roughly 50% of the time (except for the very top), no matter how well you play. If you focus on playing better it's going to be a treadmill by design. OTOH some people accept that you're going to lose 50% of matches anyway, chill and keep to lower ELO.
I need to hop back on that game.
But if the complainant actually got good then all that did was reverse the roles...
I do agree about the conclusion though. The solution for the disappointment in online matchmaking is singleplayer, and multiplayer with friends. Both completely eliminate the bad actors.
That’s quite the hyperbole, I play plenty of multiplayer games and I enjoy myself plenty wether I win or not. Granted, games like Dota, Counterstrike or Tarkov are designed for a certain ultra-competitive audience, that’s fine, but there’s plenty of choice besides, more than ever.
These competitive games might be at the top of the charts, but they are rather niche in the grand scheme of things. It's just that the kind of people that play these games, they end up only playing that one game for years for a few hours a day. But in reality they are a minority and there are many more players spread out among all other games.
I think you are projecting your motivation to play games onto others, there are many reasons to enjoy games other than just getting those fake points at the end, and not everyone is as sore for loosing.
I remember trying to hack the levelling-up mechanism on Crysis 2 - it worked by sending your post-game stats (client-side) to a master server, so editing those stats in memory before that happens would work (there seems to be no tracking of stats on the game server side - even though they could've had the game server relay that to the master server).
Memory is fuzzy but I think I managed to level up to a stage where I got the weapons I wanted. For my defense this kind of "cheating" only "cooked the books" on the leaderboards and did not give me any actual advantage in-game.
I'm thinking of Ark:Survival Evolved here, where the grind on 'official' servers is insane - for example taming a Wyvern required you to be online more or less every two hours for three days. On the unofficial servers these were downtuned so you could do things a bit more easily.
But when we briefly ran our own server and realised that we could use god-powers to get the stuff we wanted without the grind... it turned out there wasn't really anything of a game left.
Cheating is "this is my actual skill level if there wasn't so much bullshit happening to me"
Of course this is all a lie, but it's what they tell themselves.
For the people who make them it's an intellectual exercise, like solving a puzzle, it's an end in itself. That and the social credit it gives you among your technical friends.
Seeing that the cheating industry is relatively large, and functions on a subscription basis; For the vast majority of cheaters the challenge is entering their credit card to get their cheat subscription.
These are people who want to win at all costs, other users be damned.
A bit, sometimes, maybe, for some. The only person you really need to compete with is your past you. The rest... it certainly leads to less happy life, unless you keep winning way more often than the rest.
And uncontrolled, it can very easily spiral into rather destructive personality patterns over time. Parents often fuck up their kids having them compete as much as possible, laying seeds for later issues. Competitive people always compare themselves to others, never happy with what they have, regardless of how much they achieved. Literal opposite of searching for happiness in life.
I don't know about your peers but I see this behavior often in high performance environment, high achievers with sad inner lives.
I seriously considered cheating at some point just so that I can actually have some fun and get to the end-game without constantly fucking dying. But then I remembered there are other games that I also enjoyed playing, and then I stopped playing CoD.
It doesn’t seem very appealing to me, but I don’t think there’s any particularly interesting psychology behind it. Rather one could say I lack creativity and need monsters to motivate me to build anything.
Cheating in real competitive games is rude, though, for sure. But most people don’t play top-level competitive games.
Cheating in pseudo-competitive games like Overwatch or Dota is both rude and stupid. Because the game can just find people to match your cheat-augmented skill level anyway.
There were TF2 bots that autonomously queued for the game's casual matches, spammed the chat, aimbotted and made the game generally unplayable for a while, you could host a bunch of them on a not so beefy computer and make them queue separately or together.
One of the features of those bots was streaming the chat logs from the matches into Discord/Telegram channels for cheaters/bot hosters to laugh at and make compilations of. It was funny and entertaining to see people having their moods ruined for no reason.
In game (TF2 specifically), when I see cheaters, they are usually also extremely annoying/purposely abrasive in other terms as well - frequent use of racial, transphobic, homophobic slurs, furry/anime/my little pony profile pictures, blatantly cheating while denying it, general smugness - they are trying to maximize the negative reactions they can get out of you. I'm really ashamed to have once been like that and I'm really glad that I grew out of it. It was absolutely not a healthy way to have fun for myself, and not a great community to spend time in (a lot of cheaters pretend to be extremely bigoted for a reaction, but some are genuinely like that). I met some genuinely good, talented people there, but they didn't stay involved with the cheating community for long, and eventually I left it too.
Ultimately served as the most effective networking I ever did.
All in all, it's just power dynamics, and lack of compassion.
Plus most of the modern multiplayer games, especially fpses, are centered around a few individuals who have skills above the herd or they are playing by different rules (meaning of this is up to you...) and everyone else is just filler so that these above average players can "harvest" them. Just like Bodybuilding. You have the top notch competitors who everyone tries to imitate. And that is what sells the supplements, while all they buy is an illusion that one day they can achieve the same physique.
So let's say you have Apex Legends where well known players show how they literally obliterate everyone else. So the matchmaking (which is deliberately shit) sends these "predators" to hunt the prey, who are essentially sheeps.
People watch these streamers and try to imitate or get to know how to be at the skill level they have (which is near impossible for several reasons, I'd rather not explain). So the whole business centers around these outstanding persons, and the sheep buy the shiny digital bullshit, thinking that might elevate them to the "bigname" monkey's level.
Nobody on your own team is really gonna notice if you’re cheating unless it’s speed hacks or something. So your own team is hyping you up for being a god, and it feels good.
Plus a lot of people like you - trying it out for the novelty. Most people aren’t doing it, but seeing it once ever 20 games would probably be enough to drive you insane.
It feels good when you win! If you cheat, that just means you're smarter than the other player.
I ran a botting SaaS for Aion years ago, and the constant cat and mouse was what kept me going at it.