So I finally decided to play my preliminary ranked games.

I went 4 wins, 6 losses. I was gold last season -- plat previously -- and I ended up as Silver II due to losses, etc. I was actually thrilled to be Silver because I wanted to get back into the groove of ranked plus do well in the lower elo. Dear god, times have changed and everyone is amazing at LoL now or something is seriously wrong.

So I'd like to know if anyone else is experiencing something similar, but I seem to have a lot of previously high elo players absolutely destroying these games. They're not fun -- they're not even "challenging" because there's no way in hell a legitimate Silver player could actually compete with the people in Silver elo. I was actually having a much easier time playing in gold preliminary games because everyone seemed worse in skill. Did Riot change the elo/mmr formula? Did high elo players get dropped due to some odd calculation error? Because there's no way in hell the majority of the players in Silver should be there. You probably have more of a chance in PLAT than Silver. It's like how Flex used to be -- diamonds getting paired up with a mixture of elos -- decimating due to unfair advantage. And no, it's not a one time fluke because I've gotten stomped 11 games in a row -- where I was losing every other game in my prelims. The skill curve seems incredibly steep for Silver. Is anyone experiencing such a thing?