It's not the difficulty level, if you were pitched in with ten random teams from your tier it would be fairer - for some reason known only to Plarium they think a matchmaking algorithm is needed which it seems brings back a lot of teams better than yours to fight

everyone is under pressure in the arena, what you are experiencing is the overall top heavy squeeze that is in play, driving the golds into lower tiers which increases the difficulty for all concerned.

on top of that the process of resetting the scores quickly puts people into a lower tier, which unless you act quickly to recover your position, just drives you down to the bottom of the tier you just got banished into

yeah i agree its rediculous u should be matched with those in ur teir but due to the horrible system we also get some oppents with 1 level 1 champ. tho sometimes its unfair just grind for gems and use em to refresh once ur outta battles u can win. i'm an arena junkie, i do it all the time.

I spent 500 gems on my 3 week decline from gold 4 to silver....