Essentially means to play poorly on purpose, with the intent on making the opposing team stronger, or to give them a strategic advantage against your team. People do this to ruin games for whatever reason, it's a phenomena which persists throughout many multiplayer games online.

It's especially a problem in Dota because you are not allowed to forfeit a rated game (!). In Dota, only professionals are allowed to freely forfeit matches, so some players resort to tanking the game when they become dispirited to end the pain more quickly (or when they just have to leave).

If you suddenly quit a rated match, Valve will punish you with time-wasting purgatory. Some people pay money to have others help them leave purgatory.

Being able to forfeit doesn't stop people from purposely tanking the game. It incentivizes them to do it more to get their teammates to also throw in the towel and forfeit.

The difference is when it does happens, it drags out longer, but it is less common.

You can now forefit a game if you are a stack of 5 players

The pro players thought I was deliberately trying to harm them by playing badly. And they call it "feeding" if you get killed by the enemy team too often. But I was just honestly inexperienced, because I only play games casually.

Doesn't the game use "skill" based matchmaking? If so, then those were bottom of the barrel "tryhards". I had a similar experience in CS:GO YEARS ago when I bothered to play matchmaking except instead of being reported, I got repeatedly team killed for playing the objective or something.

My experiences in overwatch weren't any good either. I remember the match that made me stop playing very well too. We lost, but I had gold in every category with my two friends taking silver and bronze. Essentially, the other two people weren't playing well at all and started spouting the most toxic shit I had heard in a long while. I guess fuck us because we were just playing for fun and still managed to do better than them? Like it wasn't a blowout or anything either.

I just don't understand some people I guess. Your post managed to bring that memory and reminded me why I don't play competitive games anymore lol. There are plenty of toxic players out there, but in my experience, a lot of them are pretty bad and are most likely projecting.

Ugh, that is demoralizing.

>A term in team-based video games used to describe someone who is not playing with the team and/or is playing selfishly. This person will usually stray away from the team/objective in a match. The enemy team will be able to take advantage of this situation by either being able to kill the "feeder", or pushing towards the objective while the "feeder" is unable to help. The word originates from games where special abilities can be obtained through dealing damage. If a person is getting damage dealt to them constantly, they are "feeding" the enemies ultimate.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feeding

> Does intentional feeding mean you’re pretending to be an amateur when you’re not an amateur, or what?

No, but there is a term for that too, "smurfing".

The idea behind smurfs is for high ranked players to dunk on amateurs, rather than for high ranked players to play as badly as amateurs

Yeah, but in order to smurf you have to first tank on purpose to get into the lower-tier ranks.

Not that I've ever seen. Smurfs are all just new accounts starting with no rank