Have you watched a professional sport heavily? Comebacks are quite common in hockey, American football, and basketball. What you call repetition is likely your inability to appreciate the sportsmanship due to unfamiliarity.

I watched a lot of SC2 when the game was first released, and I still watch VODs every now and then. The game is roughly as repetitive as any other sport. Sure, there are brilliant tactical plays, but each game has one of a few broad themes.

I watch mostly soccer cause I think other teams sports are boring to watch in comparison. I admit I only have limited understanding of hockey and American football, but I know basketball pretty well, I played a lot of basketball in high-school, I even played a a city-level competition between about 30 high-schools.

Average score in soccer is probably around 2-1. Crazy comeback is 0-3 to 4-3. 0-1 to 2-1 is just a normal game. 2-0 is called "the most dangerous lead" :)

Average score in basketball is around 110-90? I just googled "basketball greatest comeback", and it said "Only eight times in NBA history has a team rallied from a 30-plus point deficit to win a game." I rest my case regarding comebacks.

In general I think of games as a spectrum creative/fluid games vs structured/efficiency games.

At 0% there's volleyball. Scoring chances are given for free every X seconds. All the foreplay is 2 passes, each time you have only 5 possible players to pass to, you don't move much. All creativity in volleyball does is - it might make the other team set up a block in the wrong place/at the wrong height, which means you increase your chance of scoring.

At 30% there's basketball - you have up to 30 seconds for foreplay, you have 4 players to pass to, they can move, but basically anything works - offense has a huge advantage over defense so if you're on the same level as the opponent - you will get a chance to score every almost time it's "your round". It's all about efficiency near the bin - creativity only gives you a slightly better scoring position and slightly more scoring chances.

In soccer there's no concept of "rounds" because you will lose possession 100 times anyway, no matter who starts the game. You can score 5 goals in 9 minutes or you can never get a scoring chance. You have to be creative and do something special to even get into a scoring position. Foreplay lasts for about 5 minutes on average between each shot, and you have to make many decisions at each step - you have 10 possible targets for your passes, and a field that's far too big for 22 players. So players without the ball have to make meaningful decisions constantly, too.

Starcraft is very close to 100% on that spectrum, because there's very little structure, and creativity is required, even if you follow a build-order. You can do a 6-pool. You can drop and harras someone to death only to lose because somebody had a ninja-base the whole time. You can turtle and build a death-ball. You can recover after a failed all-in and do a surprising (or not) tech-switch. You can lose at minut 1 and at minute 30. The win conditions change.

> Average score in basketball is around 110-90? I just googled "basketball greatest comeback", and it said "Only eight times in NBA history has a team rallied from a 30-plus point deficit to win a game." I rest my case regarding comebacks.

A good team going down 30 points in a basketball game would be extremely uncommon. And in playoffs, series are best-of-7 so there is another level of comebacks. You can lose the game, or even multiple games, and come from behind to take the series. This kind of speaks to my point that your perception is really based on a lack of understanding about the games.

If you think about goal scoring as a stochastic process where the likelihood of scoring is relative to the team's skill, then a better team could very easily go down by a few goals in soccer whereas it would be extremely unlikely for a better team to go down by dozens of goals.

Also, there have been over a hundred multi-point comebacks this season in the NHL.

> A good team going down 30 points in a basketball game would be extremely uncommon.

Why do you need to specify it's "a good team"? Comebacks can happen in a game between good and bad team. I checked NBA results few weeks back and every week some team loses by 30-40 points.

> If you think about goal scoring as a stochastic process where the likelihood of scoring is relative to the team's skill

Then from the Central Limit Theorem you will know that the more samples you take from a random variable - the less random the result will be. I.e. if you have a game where you take 1000 shots and whoever shots more wins - you don't have to play, the exact result is pretty much known beforehand.

But less randomness is only one of the problems.

Never thought about it that way, but that makes sense. Soccer and Basketball are both very free flowing with needing to make calls in the moment. There isn't really much of a huddle. Where as football and baseball feel a lot more turn based.

Basketball is still turn-based in the sense that you get your 30 seconds and you're expected to score unless you mess up. And then the opponent gets their 30 seconds. There's very little time and space for the game to diverge before it's restarted to a starting position.

And in some games (like volleyball) it's even more strict.