Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through wal…
I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. 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.