I think that's only one subset of cheaters, many people use cheats in non-pvp games or use cheats in a specific server where everyone has the same cheats. It's often just a way to get more replayability out of a game someone really enjoys.

In monster hunter, the speedrunning community is migrating to PC because the ability to use cheats to negate the huge amount of RNG present in the game. Cheating is usually looked down on by speedrunners for obvious reasons but because of the difficulty of speedrunning a game with so much RNG(not rng that effects your gameplay, but that effects your ability to play at all), modders are basically making a new game with the rng removed and people are speedrunning that, and it's widely accepted as necessary by the community.

So cheating is often just a means of either getting something new out of a game or 'fixing' aspects of a game that the community takes issue with.

I agree that players like you describe, who's main goal is griefing other players, also make up a large portion of cheaters, just wanted to further elaborate on your response that not all cheaters are doing it to 'move up the leaderboard'

I think the topic of the article is cheaters that compete with other players. Anti-cheats are not really necessary for games where the only person being cheated is the cheater.

I also excluded professional players because the original poster was basically trying to get an answer regarding what kind of person would cheat when there was no extra incentive. Obviously, professional players or players in any games that offer valuable prizes have a real incentive to cheat.

Anti-cheat is still a major issue on multiplayer games that are not PVP-centric, like MMOs. In these cases, the negative externalities of cheating are more like a tragedy of commons than griefing. Cheaters and bots screw up the economy and increase competition for training / farming areas, but generally only in aggregate. Much easier to justify than directly ruining someones experience by killing them instantly every time they spawn.

This extends even as far as Chinese dress-up MMOs like Love Nikki where people will use bots to vote randomly in competitions because there are substantial rewards for mass voting. This means that people are directly injecting randomness into one of the core parts of the game, but the players who do it feel it's justified because it's a pain to get those rewards otherwise.

> use cheats in a specific server where everyone has the same cheats

I would call this a mod, not a cheat.