Without knowing much about how the game will be played, I doubt it. Maybe at the very highest end the marginal difference will be made by the quality of proprietary computer programs shared between elite clans but enough public script sharing will go on that will make it trivial for someone to be competitive at the lower levels without knowing a line of code.

> Is it going to be a programming competition rather than a computer game?

I certainly hope so. It is rare in games that you get better in virtual word by training a skill that is useful in real life.

Someone please do something like that for maths, physics and chemistry; we may yet be able to save education.

This may be a little offtopic but Core War [1] was a lot of fun.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War