one of the (many) difficult things about designing a competitive spectator oriented game, is balancing the often conflicting desires of two different groups that engage in with the game in different ways. Players and spectators will often want entirely different things from the game, the game designer has to make compromises to keep both groups happy because if either one of those groups gets unhappy enough to move on the game fails.
So like, one example of this sort of friction can be illustrated with big cinematic super moves in fighting games, they're very easy to make super stylish and spectators love them, but players who have seen them thousands and thousands of times will eventually start to view them as an unskippable cutscene interrupting their fun game. If you balance that correctly it can be just a small gripe for players and a massive selling point for spectators, but it does have to be balanced. If you have too many supers that go on for too long and have too much of an impact on the game you can lose your players, but if they're too short, too infrequent or just plain not cool enough you can lose spectators.
This isn't really news though, I've seen lots of people talk about trying to balance these different groups and what has and hasn't worked for them, but one thing I've never really seen pointed out is that you can minimize the amount of this type of balancing you have to do!
For example, one thing you can do is use visual conveyance to make sure the players and spectators are feeling the same thing about the gameplay that's happening on the screen, by doing this you can eliminate the friction between these two groups that requires compromises to be made before you have to actually make a compromise.
To use a concrete example of this, in fighting games having your back up against a wall (literally) is usually a pretty bad place to be in. When you're in the corner you lose access to many defensive tools that allow you to win hits or work your way out of the corner AND your opponent unlocks more punishing combos to use against you.
So how is this disadvantaged position portrayed visually? Well when you get to the wall the screen stops scrolling, the wall is usually invisible except for when you actually get hit against it where it shows a little visual effect. I think that's massively understated, and doesn't communicate to spectators that this is a totally different game state from one where both players are in the middle of the stage!
I'm not sure exactly how I'd do it but just to shotgun some ideas: Maybe the wall should always be visible and be as imposing as it feels when your back is up against it, you could have the stage's lighting change and get more dramatic the further the center point between the players gets to the wall, you could have dynamic soundtracking that makes the mood more tense, you could change animations (but not frame data) to make characters in the corner look more tired or nervous.
And it's not just tense situations that can be conveyed better either! If you've ever watched top players watch replays and talk about them you might have seen a situation where a really good player gets crazy hype about the tiniest little microspacing adjustment and is like "that just won them the game." and you're like "I can't even see that." I think that's a failure to convey the parts of the game that are most important to the players to the spectators! The coolest and most important things in gameplay should look the coolest and most important! When spectators and players are getting hyped about the same things neither of them has to compromise for the benefit of the other.
Now, I think it's impossible to completely eliminate friction between two different groups that are fundamentally engaging with the game in different ways but at the same time not every instance of friction needs to be mediated because it might not even need to be a source of friction in the first place!