Feeder and the Furion feed: Dota's protest deaths

From the English feed to fidit

The word comes from the English feed. Every hero death gives the enemy gold and experience, so a player who dies a lot is literally feeding the other team. The 2012 dota2.ru guide defines fidit, "to feed," as "dying to enemy heroes on purpose."

The esports.ru glossary puts it more harshly: "Feed: a deliberate death aimed at losing quickly." A feeder is someone who does that. Both definitions stress intent: the point is not just dying often, but dying on purpose.

iCCup and hosts in the original Dota

The most vivid feeding story dates back to DotA Allstars. Back then the main venue was iCCup, a Warcraft III platform that a cyber.sports.ru blog called "the most popular platform for playing the original Dota" in 2018. The author of another blog described its rating system as "normal."

Lobbies were started by a "host," who loaded the map, set the mode, and before the start could kick a player or assign teams by hand. Against that backdrop, a special way of fighting leavers emerged, which the cyber.sports.ru blog "5 memories of DotA Allstars. Old-timers will shed a tear" recalled on January 6, 2020.

"Now you'll play until the end"

The scenario went like this. On iCCup a game did not count if someone left before the first kill within the first five minutes. "Fighters against the system" picked Furion (Nature's Prophet) and right at the start gave up first blood at the enemy fountain, typing in chat: "Now you'll play until the end."

After that, as the author describes it, they calmly farmed and played to win: the match now counted. The author ironically calls these players "the Order of Feeding Furions." Outright griefers used the same move too: they gave up the death, left the game, and abandoned their team in a hopeless position.

An important caveat: this protest is described in detail by only one source, a 2020 blog, while the term feed itself is confirmed by several glossaries. There is no exact date for when the "Furion feed" appeared; all that is known is that it happened in the 2000s.

The feeder in Dota 2

The word made the jump to Dota 2 intact. The year 2012 on the card is when the term entered a slang glossary for the new game: the dota2.ru guide came out on August 20, 2012. Later the esports.ru glossary for beginners described feeding too.

Related words live alongside it: ruiner, someone who wrecks a game on purpose, and liv, leaving a match. The catalog also has the related meme "Mid or feed," where feeding becomes a threat to one's own team.

Nature's Prophet in the picture

In the catalog the meme is illustrated with a portrait of the hero Nature's Prophet (Furion): a horned forest mage with a white-and-blue beard, in close-up. The image is small.

It is not a still from a particular match but a hero portrait. Furion was chosen because he is the hero in the story of feeding on iCCup.

Example feeder captions

These examples are made up for illustration: "When they didn't give you mid and you open the Furion tab," "Your teammate picked Nature's Prophet and has been silent for a minute," "I'm not a feeder, I just feed the enemy out of pity," "Minute one on iCCup, and Furion is already standing at the enemy fountain."

Captions can play on nostalgia for iCCup or on the eternal chat argument over which teammate is feeding. In the second case, the Furion picture is a hint that old-school players will get.