You might be assuming too much of them. ESEA's client is barely hacked together and, like most other anti-cheat software, uses some nasty methods to detect cheating. I wouldn't be surprised if their other development processes reflect on that.

I thought the same thing. How much code would it take to set up this mining operation? It seems unlikely that the amount of code added is trivial enough to go undetected.

There is a conspiracy theory going around regarding this issue being orchestrated collectively by the ESEA admins. This theory comes from several really weird statements from ESEA admin ipkane, made months before the Bitcoin mining was implemented.

I came to say exactly this. No code reviews, no source control. Pretty scary.

Scary at the least. I guess we dont know the whole story. Was it just 1 guy, a group of guys? Wow.