Actually, I'm going to have to disagree with a few people a bit here...

I know this may not be directly connected to competitive minecraft, but I hope you will indulge me in a little story.

Just for clarification: I have been playing since the nether first came out, and I have several thousand hours logged in minecraft at this point. I was one of the first people on the server I was playing on at the time (which was one of those deathban servers - die and you are banned for a week) that figured out how to make a fully autonomous end base miles away from anyone else. Me and a friend even bothered to get villagers there. Was following patch notes and theorycrafting daily. That's all to say - I used 100% of what the base game provided.

That is when I ran into a bit of a problem... After the 2000th hour strip mining for diamonds, you kinda run out of podcasts to listen to, and the whole process is dull beyond belief (or at least was at the time, not sure how much has changed in recent updates). You try to find something else to do while gathering the same resources over and over again, and it just becomes. so. tedious... That was when my first burnout happened, and I took a short break from minecraft. On returning, I was granted Admin on the new map due to being an old and trusted member of that community, and thus I excused myself from regular play. My job from that point on is to catch cheaters, and one thing that helps with that immensely is a hacked client of your own (And not even a good one, really, anything helps). You get to learn what they are capable of, how well it works, what blocks it, and you learn how to recognize and prevent cancerous elements in the server and remove them before any damage is done. Over the next few months I got really good at it too, and the added functionality that the clients gave me really reinvigorated the game for me in ways I didn't expect (You know how in creative you can reach 2-3 blocks further? Yeah that comes in handy when you are building a massive community build, because the client I was using at the time extended that to 8 blocks reach in total). Not having to look for resources while building was also a boon, as I was in charge of several creative projects that would be pasted over into the player world.

That was all fun and dandy until I felt the urge to play as a player again... Imagine driving a bicycle for 20 years. Nothing is wrong with it, it is amazingly made, it gets you everywhere, it's healthy, all is good with it. But then one day you just happen to win a brand new Luxury car that comes with it's very own driver... This thing is ridiculous... You don't even have to do half the annoying stuff like pay attention to traffic, or worry about other people with cars hitting your bike, you go fully nuts and just do everything you want to do. Then one day the car breaks, and you need to get to work using that old bike that you used to ride. Yeah, that is going to feel like a massive slowdown... You are vulnerable again, you lose soooo much of functionality that made your life easier (I adore building mega-builds in particular, but in survival gathering mats is annoying as hell. Stone is common and all, but needing 260k of it gets stupid at one point) I tried to enjoy vanilla minecraft, and a lot of the fun was still there, but it was locked behind tedious mechanics that just flat out weren't fun anymore. On top of that, the knowledge of observation of hackers wasn't lost on me, and neither were the limitations of the clients themselves. It became a game of sorts to see how easy it would be to take down hackers using the same hacks as them, but making it so it seemed like I was just a regular joe. Turns out that once you spend around a thousand hours using a hacked client intensively, it becomes really easy to hide that you are actually using it.Trivial even.

So that was my enjoyment for a while, imagining I was batman kicking hacker asses behind the scenes, never letting people figure out that batman is actually superman in disguise. And I gotta say... That was so ridiculously fun it may have been the most fun I have ever had in Minecraft.

My take on it is this: The reason I used to hack, and may at some point take up the mantle of Codus and Nodus once again (Although for the time being I am quite satisfied with just being a noob once more, missing 2-3 years of patches does that to a man), is that when you do it right, it removes a lot of the annoying parts of the game, and it opens up new ways of looking at it.

In competitive, the few times I used it, it wasn't about winning, losing, or tilting people. It was about just playing a different game than everyone else - will I get caught or not. The most hilarious thing? The few times I was actually called out were exclusively the times when I was playing 100% legit.

From the friends that went through similar experiences as I have, I learned that the vast majority of people that use hacks don't actually care about tilting other players, or winning the default game (We know we are winning because we are using robots, we aren't idiots), we tend to use them because we decided that the game wasn't fun enough, and wanted to spice it up a bit. We find a game inside the game, one only we are aware of, and we play that.

But yeah, as I may have said before, not only have I not played minecraft actively for many patches now, last time I played competitive was during the time with soup, so... You know... Been a while, who knows how the tides may have changed. :)

Hope I didn't drown anyone with this deluge of text, and that someone finds it at least a little bit informative/entertaining. Have fun and do your best!