Recently, I was able to talk with someone I know who uses "hacked clients" and I heard some very interesting responses to some of my questions. With their permission, as long as I don't say who they are, they have allowed me to share my interview with them:

Q: Why do you hack on minecraft servers?
A: Well, first, its not really hacking. Technically speaking hacking is accessing unauthorized data in a computer system. Because of this, its more modding as the things that clients are based on, like the minecraft coder pack or minecraft forge, are both free and open source to modify. All data that a client gets is the same as any other player, its just what the game does that is different. Anyways, back to your question, I use these modified clients because the game got somewhat boring so I ended up thinking what would it be like to try to use a client. First I tried to find anarchy servers, where it would be allowed to use them, but I ended up eventually using them on bigger and bigger servers, like Mineplex.

Q: Why did you, like many others, turn to mineplex?
A:It was one of the many mini-games servers I had played on. In my opinion, I much preferred playing on hive to play TIMV where I don't need a client to have fun. This made me decide I didn't really care for the server so I decided to "hack" there so I could use my auras and other pvp "hacks".

Q: Aren't you afraid of being banned? or at least worry about it?
A: Not really. Most servers have very lame punishments for using unwanted mods and clients. Most of the time I see one day bans, 14 day bans, 1 Month bans. I sometimes hear about perma bans on mineplex but they are rare. Some people in the community, (some of the "hackers" on mineplex kind of have their own community in the way they treat each other in game) have a few alternate accounts so they rarely get banned entirely. For them, there is no reason to care if they get banned as they can re-join.

Q: Why do so many people hack on mineplex?
A: Besides vanilla servers, Mineplex is the easiest server I know to "hack" on. You can fly, use regen, tracers, ESP, Jesus, Speed, Fast bow, Kill Aura and in essence every hack there is. Their anti-cheat system GWEN is terrible. While it will catch the careless person flying or using kill aura, if you only use mob aura ( for things like killing hiders in block hunt ) or just use kill aura in a big crowd of people, the person that flies above your head to detect cheating will never be hit. Meaning you will never be banned. Most bans you will get are from players reporting you which is rare if your careful and unlikely if you're careless.

Q: Why do you think mineplex anti-cheat is so bad?
A: Its likely because of all of their plugins. If it was good, the double jump they had wouldn't work or would be the only thing to bypass it. Because of everything they do to the game, it gets more difficult to find the cheaters with a plugin. For another example: Is the player using a speed "hack" or using speed boost? Mineplex could implement a system that would work much better and from the programming side, its relativity simple as much better servers, in terms of anti-cheat ( interestingly they are the smaller servers ) exist! The thing is it would take some work. Plugins would have to be re-written and it may effect normal players. In the end, its almost always easier to cheat than it is to prevent cheating where you have to look at every event and calculate if its within the bounds of what the player can do.

Do YOU have any other questions for the hacker? If so, leave a comment with the question and I'll ask them and reply with what they said.