User blog comment:The Koromo/Things You Love in One Piece (That Everyone Else Hates)/@comment-5837113-20130823233107/@comment-1595565-20130824002617

Long Ring I'm guessing was Oda's attempt at an alternative form of competition. Up until then (and all the time after), it was just fighting, until you got to that arc and it became games. There were still fighting elements involved, but they took a back seat to the game itself. Oda seemed to have stoppedd liking it about 2/3 of the way through, as he made the last event an actual fight. I imagine if he liked the idea more he might have had the Straw Hats adopt the Davy Back Fight dynamic as one of their main forms of conflict resolution. But he didn't, so the fighting got to stay.