Stephen Tu, on 2018-June-14, 19:00, said:
I guess my main frustration with this IMP format is when the bot randomly decides to hand opp 12/13 imps on a big board by misbidding/misdefending. Then the joy of carrying this score forward to round two without the countering bot gifts against other opps that allowed you to advance. I wonder if round two ought to be 32 boards against the other group qualifiers, with an additional 16 against the players in original group, if we are going to have carry-forward.
I thought about having longer matches in the second round robin, but it gets a bit complicated - for those you've already played with, are you having two independent 16 board VP results, or trying to combine the two in a 32 board VP result - neither really gives an accurate/fair result. And given you've already had a match against someone, it seems wrong to scrub it out entirely. (You could argue the same for the semi/final, but thought at that point 1v4 and 2v3 was enough advantage.)
As it stands, the 12 people in round 2 will end up playing one challenge against everyone else. Whether you got unlucky/lucky in that challenge doesn't really change if you played it earlier or played it now.
Plus, I didn't want to overload everyone with challenges - personally I'm all for making them longer, but 26x16 boards for the two finalists seemed on par with earlier events.
So will stick as is for now, but happy to take suggestions for the next event (which will be MP, so changes things a lot).