you know i never got why people cheat money or exp in a game
dont you literally buy the game to play, progress and get better; but make it obsolete by cheating, kind of wasting your money?
i.g in payday 2 i have 900 hours with no cheating, whilst i see people with thrice my rank with just 20 hours. what a waste of money, no?
tl;dr: Each player will have different motivations for buying and during playing the game. Cheating is usually a form of bypassing something we don't want to do, so that we can instead work on something we do want to do.
Players will always take the ultimate method of disposal.
You'll see a lot of players simply spam a light melee button in fighter games, even though there are awesome combos that they could use. Some players will never use magic or any kind of strategy so long as their sword swings. Some players will just rush past every combat encounter they can without fighting. There are many players of the Fallout/Oblivion games (including me) who won't play the game Vanilla and/or without cheats.
The point is that players will use whatever methods they have at their disposal to achieve the goals they want to achieve. I don't think I ever played GTA IV without using the phone cheats for weapons and vehicles. Not every player is going to want to complete every challenge we game designers throw at players.
It's not a waste of money, however. If the player simply wants to hack their way to the top of a leaderboard and quit, that's their prerogative, and it probably was worth it to them. But I honestly think most of these "cheating" players simply want to experience other parts of the game, and aren't too interested in the main challenges. I'm glad this is the case too, because otherwise we wouldn't have speedrunning, modders, glitch videos, machinima creators and other important gaming people.
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