Interesting, but not surprising, when money gets involved things like this always crop up, and it's just going to get worse if there is enough exposure for people to start seriously gambling on it.
That said, I have increasingly little faith in organized competitions anymore since there is no way to watch the watchdogs so to speak, and politics and cultural differances get involved too heavily without the people who are supposed to be neutral putting their food down. With something like gaming it's just going to get worse if they ever tried to go global due to the differances between Eastern and Western players and attitudes on fair competition.
Of course in my case a lot of this has to do with the last two Olympics where China seemed to be going absolutly insane with the cheating, and no action was really taken. The Olympics are supposed to be "the" event with the highest standards (more so than major league sporting organizations) and it just got too political. I remember back in Beijing how they had those likely underage girls competing and all of the contreversies and blockades about that. This year while they seemed to be taking doping tests more seriously, China seemed to be under a lot of suspician, and one article I read referanced their "excuse" as being "Well, if the US or Russia do it, it's no big deal, so why should it be for China?" not that they were caught, but at the same time there are accusations people were intentionally lax with some (but not all) of the Chinese medal winners for fear of what they might find. Whether that's true or not is debatable, it kind of went away when China didn't win the medal count over the US, but at the same time it seemed to me not enough was being done publically, and then of course there were the shadows of Beijing.
The bottom line is that if you can't even keep the Olympics straight, and free from this kind of contreversy (which involves more than China) you can't expect things like pro-gaming to be any more honest.
I'll be frank, I expect the big thing with pro-gaming to be the people running the tournaments doing the "fixes" when the time comes. There are enough variables involved in these games where it's going to be tricky to tell if the software/computers/whatever provided by the sponsors aren't set up to subtly favor one person/group or another with the RNG or whatever. On something like Starcraft a slight input delay on one side or the other just makes them look slower, in things like LoL with random numbers involved as far as I can tell someone's crit percentages/defenses being adjusted covertly might not be noticible to an observer if it's done correctly.
Give it a few years, people might not believe it or see it, but if you think this is bad, just watch, if this takes off, you'll have the guys running these tournaments eventually caught in cahoots with bookies in Vegas or whatever to subtly manipulate the outcome, which is arguably harder to control/police than things like Boxing where there have already been tons of problems.
