Hi, I hope you're having a good day.

There seems to be two very distinct types of competitions. A competition will either have a few problems that scale in difficulty very quickly, or have more accessible problems and a slightly less punishing gradient. The first type leads to large numbers of contestants reaching specific problems and then their ranks being decided mainly on speed which I see as a bad thing, however it does allow the contestants to stretch their skills to the limit which allows some to really shine. One example of one of these contests is the most recent(873 D2) where almost 70% completed the first 3 problems. The second type leads to more even distributions of the rankings but it doesn't really allow for contestants to be challenged as they have less time to do each problem.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on which type you tend to prefer!