I was a cheat developer and I did hang out with cheaters and other developers. I'm surprised people in this thread haven't mentioned one big motivation for cheating yet. Plain old trolling, making other people mad at you, making them insult you in chat, etc.
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.
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.