Quote Originally Posted by BlisteringFrost View Post
Pretty reasonable question. There was a case study done with Destiny 2 a couple years ago, actually, because of how horrible the game was getting with cheaters, particularly in PvP. Most recently they just slapped over 3,600 accounts who cleared the newest raid on Contest mode (think Week 1 raiding but with extra mechanics basically, but it's only available for 2 days after the first clear, then the easy version unlocks for everybody to farm) in under 20 minutes (not mathematically possible). But I digress. This case study was a guy hunting down a lot of the cheaters contact, and not so much to do anything malicious, or vigilantism. The guy just wanted to ask a question. WHY? Even after they get banned and come back. Why?

The tl;dr is they literally just can't play the game without them anymore. It's too different for them to handle. It's not all that different from a bad addiction in a way. A good example was when Nintendo released LOZ: Tears of the Kingdom. There was a nasty glitch that let you duplicate items on a massive scale. Many players were using this to dupe Diamonds to hyper-generate Rupees and rare crafting materials. When Nintendo inevitably fixed this bug, there was a massive outrage over it. People literally refunded or dropped the game entirely, because they couldn't cheat anymore without reverting the game back to a previous patch state. Which, realistically, most people dunno how to do that. Their experience was too drastically different without it that they wouldn't play it anymore.

The same logic applies here. A lot of cheaters do it just because after their first time doing it, they can't even comprehend playing the game any other way. In some cases it's for RMT, or to self-inflate ego. For others, it's literally no different than an addiction.
Wait, is it still cheating in an offline single player game when no one else is involved? I mean, back then you could give yourself infinite money, HP, or power for free for PC games with mods or even paid DLC if the devs wanted the extra money. Also, no one would be affected other than letting me cut down on the grinding parts or so I could craft more items faster.

Finally, I understand why it would be bad to cheat in an online MMO with PVP mode since they used to give exclusive rewards, titles, rankings vs actual human players. Also, PvP is kinda ignored in FFXIV, but still I understand it would be frustrating if players want to farm the pvp achievements.