Yes and no… It tends to be less that we’re trying to make a specific meta and more that we’re trying to avoid certain metas.

Like any other patch, we use the champion balance framework to determine which champs to buff and nerf for Worlds, but the types of changes we make are likely to be more focused on pro play. For example, if we have high confidence that certain champions will have a 100% presence at Worlds, we are likely to try to address this via direct nerfs or by buffing counters. Akali and Aatrox have both seen recent nerfs on account of this expectation. Another thing we generally try to avoid are extremely low-lethality metas for Worlds. A recent example of this is Tahm Kench—we expected him to have a very high pick rate and somewhat low ban rate. We think that at such a high presence, he degrades the quality of the play and viewer experience. As such, we reduced his early safety in patch 9.19.

At the end of the day, we expect pro teams will gravitate toward certain (and evolving) picks over the course of a long tournament like Worlds, so the approach we take is to try to establish the parameters. In other words, we try to anticipate all of the possible Worlds metas that we might see, and if we think any of those are particularly undesirable for the players and/or viewers, we’ll buff or nerf accordingly to steer away from those metas.