Haha! That's good to hear then. Upon people's request, I tweaked the AI to make it more difficult. Then someone pointed out a bug which gave player 1 an unfair advantage (sometimes when P1 and P2 attack simultaneously, p2 gets a bit stuck for a frame, which causes p1 to win the exchange since p1 is ahead and connects first). This same bug also that caused p1 to win 9/10 in cpu vs cpu.
You might have unknowingly used this every now and then, winning exchanges easily. Now that that's been pointed out and fixed, and with the new AI plus parry, cpu is more difficult.
As for the blocking recovery taking longer, it is actually the same. It might seem slower because I made some tweaks to the block start (as well as some attacks). The starting block animation used to be as slow as the block recovery, but it's much faster now. Apart from looking more correct and pleasing, it was shortened for parry--getting hit during the first few frames of start block would trigger parry. A shorter window makes it more difficult to perform, preventing abuse.
A few have commented that the game is now too hard, so I'm thinking of implementing a difficulty level.