hacking and cheating is something different to changing hotkeys. Even small things like voice language is important! imagine jove who doesnt speak english playing with english audio
live finals have no benefit to this tourney and cause a lot of trouble. just ditch this stupid idea and carry on. it spoils this otherwise good initiative of relic to give something back to the community.
Also i have to admit that i didnt read the rules for this tourney. but i cant imagine that it is stated anywhere that every player has to be able to play the finals in vancouver if it comes to that. to disqualify noggano is a poor move. at least give him the 2nd place price money, which he earned! anybody who says something different cant be in his right mind, i'm sorry! he won the semi-finals thus he won min 1000$...
If Noggano logs in from his account the steam client will automatically download russian language for him. Even if they force them to play on different accounts the language change option is still there an there is no reason why they would make him play in english.
All the other inconveniences are equal for both players. If they are need their hotkeys changed relic can just allow them both to use autohotkey, problem solved.
Belive me or not but there are many people out there who think that top players are not really that good and use cheats instead. Live even would prove them wrong. Also live event is something community was silently dreaming of for 10 years now. Not to mention that in most e-sports wins in live events are much more important than in online tourneys.
And yeah, he earned that money. Relic should do what they can, including financial support, to bring him to canada for the finals instead of threathening him with disqualify.