Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 1

Have a large, well-balanced, differentiated roster. This is directly related to point 3 of my last article. Point for point:
-Large: Lots of options for players.
-well-balanced: Lots of viable options.
-differentiated: Lots of DIFFERENT viable options. Try to keep, at the very least, the base options ("Fragile Speedster", "Brick Wall", "Ryu/Mario/etc.")
Good examples of this are present fairly often in high-tier fighting games, but I think the best one to take is Guilty Gear XX Accent Core. The game has a cast of around 20 chars, and each of them plays radically differently. You can pick a character for whatever playstyle you want to keep (Chipp for the Fragile Speedster, Potemkin for the Brick Wall, Ky for the Ryu, and all kinds of different flavors in between). This is very hard to design for, but it's still worthwhile.