To be entirely honest I've always wondered about the oversight in tournaments like this. When your looking at a series of moves that a key game designer cannot pull off themselves (like those parries) it definatly has me wondering about the validity of some of these feats. I'm not just talking about fighting games either, but also RTS games and the like.
It's sort of like how in poker you wind up with shills and proposition players who wind up working for the house, and not gambling with their own money (or with their own funds in very specific circumstances), given a free hand to cheat, and other things, in order to control the outcome of tournaments and limit the amount of money that actually leaves the venue.
The trick here of course is that for these guys to work, they can't seem like shills or props, they have to be seen as legitimate, and years can go into building up these identities, all over the world. People being able to say "I know player X, and there is no way that he's a Shill, I've met him, seen him all over the world!" is exactly the point.
Whether it's a fighting game tournament, an RTS competition, or whatever else, I constantly wind up wondering if the guys putting up the money modified the software and only told their guy on how to exploit it, to make it look legit. Sure cheaters are punished, but that isn't nessicarly going to apply to their cheaters that they are setting up. I've wondered what would happen if wins were made contingent on a third, unrelated, party going through the
code after the conclusion of the actual matches. Say having the tournament, declaring a winner, but not considering it an actual victory until a week later when experts have
gone through the game line by line.
Nothing specific about Daigo (or Justin Wong) other than the simple point that when one of the game developers can't emulate a specific set of moves under ideal conditions, it's enough to bring my suspicians about E-sports to the forefront.
I'll also say that over the years I've heard a lot of criticism over events like Pokemon that are largely dominated by The Japanese or Koreans. Nothing has ever been proven of course, but there does seem to be an undercurrent of national pride, combined with some
shady accusations here and there about things being loaded to keep them on top, with only enough exceptions to give the veneer of legitimacy. Before anyone comments I am not saying I entirely believe this since I'm not interested enough to really dig into it to form a solid opinion, but it's another general situation where again I think we need to see more oversight.
See E-sports and Geek events (collectible card game tournies, etc...) especially the former, have a lot of potential. I could see this becoming a big thing like pro-sports in general, with the gaming industry having the potential to become like sports franchises and big hollywood studios wrapped together. One of the big problems though is that mostly these kinds of things tend to be set up as promotional events, and I don't think there are enough watchdogs with their eyes on things, especially looking towards the companies and hosts. People seem to be too focused on the novelty of there being tournaments with purses attached, to look at the big picture the way people do with other competitions. Among other things I think the gaming industry needs to move away from product promotion with these things, and take a long term view of what E-sports can be (ie capitolizing on them once they become legitimate, rather than trying to use them for short term press and promotional value), and one of the first steps there is to get third parties involved for oversight. As odd as it sounds, companies like Nintendo have too much direct control over things like the official Pokemon tournaments for them to ever be taken seriously (above and beyond the obvious) the way they are run means that there are always going to be doubts. The same can be said about official street fighter tournaments and such, with Capcom having no real neutral accountability.
