today I decided I'd dip my toes back into some modern tetris VS since my skill at 20G stuff seems to be regressing at the moment, and I also perhaps need to get acclimated to low-G again since that's kind of suffering too from not playing it as much. so, I jumped into Zone Battle in Tetris Effect and did some ranked matches today.
notably today is the first time I had played multi in Effect after Enhance changed it so you couldn't dodge in queue, and it seems to have made the experience better at least from my perspective. i'm only in the 7.7k range, which I'd wager is fairly average among dedicated players, but even at that level I was having problems with getting dodged. I imagine that problem would be far, far worse for the elites at 10k and up, where the playerbase that can actually match you starts getting smaller and smaller
felt like most of the matches I got were at least decently close, even considering that most players i found were in the range of +/- 1k compared to myself, and I also got a lot more of them than i think I've managed to find any other time I've played the game. maybe I just happened to hit the queue at a time the game was more active, but I imagine not having to worry as much about opponents just deciding to not play against you also probably helps both find games more quickly, and also encourages people at a certain skill level to play the game more since now you're more likely to actually be able to play it instead of sitting on the matchmaking screen for five minutes or more at a time. good stuff