Riot Games, which runs the League of Legends World Championship (Worlds), also changes the game shortly before each tournament. This concentration of authority raises a governance question: Who scrutinizes how the benefits and burdens of late rule changes are distributed? We examine all ten championships from 2016 to 2025, combining 1,097 games, 215 team-years, and LLM coding of 1,090 champion changes across 40 patches. On average, 33% of a team's prior picks were on champions with net nerfs in the patches it had not played before Worlds, and 8% were on champions with net buffs. Within a year, the median gap between the most and least affected teams was 23 percentage points for nerfed picks and 12 for buffed picks. Nerfs fell mainly on the most-contested champions and buffs on less-contested ones, as Riot's published balancing criteria anticipate. Pools concentrated on the prevailing meta therefore had more negative net exposure, and even the winners of a year's four major regional leagues differed in net exposure about as much as four randomly drawn teams. Higher buff exposure was associated with additional opponent bans on buffed champions, although its size depends on the model. Among quarterfinalists, the most buff-exposed team of each year reached six of ten finals and won four titles. The team with the most negative net exposure reached two finals and won one. These exploratory descriptions identify unequal exposure, not causal gains or losses. The association between net exposure and winning remains uncertain, at +1.3 percentage points per standard deviation with a 95% interval from -0.9 to +3.7. We argue that scrutiny of late rulemaking should not depend on proving that a patch changed who won Worlds. Earlier patch commitments, team-level impact disclosure, independent review, and a formal opportunity to challenge decisions would make publisher authority more accountable.

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