Tone down turtling. This does not lead to a more competitive game in and of itself, but it definitely leads to a more fun game. Give attacks high chip damage. Have a "block meter" that goes down as long as you are blocking, and ensure that you have a decent amount of blockstun (Super Smash Bros 64 almost got this one right, in fact, it went overboard-you can lock your opponent in their shields with fast, strong attacks until the shield breaks, giving you a free attack!). Make it so that projectiles encourage approaching with them (read: very slow, fairly large, easy to block, lots of startup, very low cooldown). Make your options out of block fairly poor; make sure that blocking your opponent's attack is either not easy to do safely (mindgames, not tech skill...), or not a good place to be in-Super Smash Bros Brawl does this very poorly; it has been said that grabbing your opponent out of block is one of the strongest moves in the game, and I'm tempted to agree with it. Make sure that the playing field is not set up in such a way that faster characters can run circles around slower characters (again: Brawl has several characters who can basically run away and spam safe options the whole game-not exactly a fun thing).
There are quite a few games where the gameplay devolves very quickly into extreme camping, runaway, and blocking everything. This is a very, VERY bad thing for a game's popularity. I mean, ask the SSBM crowd what they think of Brawl. And when a game isn't popular, it cannot garner competition because nobody will want to play it.
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