I ended preseason at Silver 1. I lost my first game in preliminaries and then won the next 9 games! I was feeling so on top of the world! I knew it was going to give me Bold V! But, low and behold, a big fat Silver IV popped up...
How is it that I have the best prelims of my life and get the lowest reward for it? What happened?
I had same thing went from decent mmr in diamond 4 to plat 4 after going 8-2
That's not bad, really. Everybody loses a bunch of MMR with each new season's "soft reset", so most people drop several divisions. A lot of people are dropping a whole tier. The highest you can place is Plat 1, so even Challengers drop a significant distance, which in turn compacts the player distribution for lower average placement at the start of the season.
TL;DR - This is normal. You'd need much higher MMR than the Rank you were in to place higher.
