User blog comment:B214/Volume 22 spoilers/@comment-27083298-20161115021134/@comment-10330822-20161116064246

However, a factor in this tournament is that you can't seem to challenge teams with less points than you. The extra point bonus for defeating higher point teams also encourages this. Meaning that as the points of your team increases, the more and more you need to fight teams with similar or higher amounts of points, and the harder that becomes. So, in the end if you get enough points you "eliminate" yourself from challenging others by winning, because no one has enough points for you to challenge. Hence why Issei decided to accept all challenges, he is not in a traditional tournament style game, he is being actively challenged by different teams all at once.

As for your point. Issei's negative reviews seemed to be contributed to the fact he is "struggling" against his weaker enemies, while his weaker enemies are getting good reviews for performing "well" against a superior enemy, despite lossing points for lossing. So, its a question of how badly is Issei beating his enemy determines his reviews. It's sort of like DBZ Xenoverse or any of those other performance-based games. The more of a smash fest the game is, the higher ranking you get. If Issei goes into a room and just punches all the enemies through the roof, he gets great reviews, because he defeated them effortlessly and with minimal energy. A completely dominate show of power.

I just wonder what exactly is the margin for "struggling" is. Its almost as if the judges need to be very aware of the capabilities of the user beforehand to really tell if they are struggling or just going over board. After all, if Issei goes Cardinal Crimson, it sort of insinuates difficulty, but if he doing that because he has plenty of energy to spare, not because he needs to, then its a different situation.