Inting is short for intentionally feeding: deliberately dying to enemy champions to hand them gold and experience, usually to grief teammates or rage-quit a game without quitting. The term originated in League of Legends, then spread to Overwatch, Valorant, and Apex. Riot treats verified intentional feeding as a bannable offense and, since April 2026, even pays affected teammates back with LP and Autofill Protection through the new Disruptive Behavior Repair system.
The complication is that "inting" has drifted in casual usage to mean "playing badly," which is not the same thing and is not punishable. The rest of this guide covers the full taxonomy: hard inting vs. soft inting vs. regular feeding, why "Inting Sion" is a legitimate strategy, and how Riot actually decides who gets banned.
Inting vs. Feeding: The Difference Is Intent
The League wiki splits dying repeatedly into two categories, and the distinction matters for both punishment and how teammates should react:
- Feeding: dying a lot because you played badly. New to the champion, bad matchup, mistake-prone, tilted. Not bannable. Not reportable as griefing.
- Inting (intentional feeding): deliberately dying to sabotage your team. Bannable. Reportable. Riot's Player Reporting Guide lists "poor play (while trying to win)" as explicitly NOT reportable, which is the line.
The casual community has collapsed these two terms. People say "this Yasuo is inting" when they mean "this Yasuo is 0/7." Riot has not. The enforcement system is built around intent, not death count.
A third term sits between them: running it down mid. This is the most flagrant version of inting, where a player abandons their lane and walks their champion repeatedly into the enemy team to die. It was popularized as a phrase by Tyler1, whose 17 banned accounts and 2016 hardware-level ban (lifted in 2018) are the most-cited case study in League's behavioral history.
Soft Inting: The Gray Zone
Soft inting is the harder problem. The player is not running into the enemy team and dying on purpose. They are passively losing the game on purpose: refusing to teamfight, farming a side lane while their team gets aced at Baron, abandoning objectives, ignoring pings, picking fights they cannot win and then disengaging. The result is a loss without the smoking gun of repeated visible deaths.
Is soft inting a real thing?
Yes. Riot's game director Pu Liu publicly acknowledged in July 2024 that soft inting was "a large problem in the game" and that detection had to extend beyond death counts to behavioral patterns. The community had been complaining about it for years. The acknowledgement was the policy shift.
Is soft inting bannable?
Yes, but with a higher detection bar than hard inting. Riot's official definition of griefing is "taking deliberate actions with the intent of reducing the team or a teammate's likelihood of success." That covers soft inting, and the Instant Feedback System processes reports against it. The catch is that detection draws on compound data across multiple games rather than single-match deaths, so a single bad game where you farmed a side lane will not get you banned. A pattern across many games can.
Riot does not publicly disclose what the system looks for, by design. The 2023 detection blog says directly: "We won't share exactly what the system looks for, because we don't want to reveal the special sauce."
"Inting Sion" Is a Real Strategy, Not Toxic Behavior
Inting Sion is the most-cited counterexample to the rule that intentional dying is always griefing. The strategy: pick Sion, build full tank, run down mid lane taking turret aggro and dying to push a wave into the enemy base. Why it works is Sion's passive, Glory in Death, which reanimates him as a zombie with bonus damage based on enemy max health for several seconds after death. Players using the strategy were intentionally dying to get to zombie form fast, which then crashed waves and pressured towers across the map while their team grouped 4v5 elsewhere. It was a legitimate split-push variant, popularized by Twitch streamer Thebausffs.
Riot's response is the interesting part. They did not ban Inting Sion players. They balance-patched the strategy in patch 12.9 (May 2022) by cutting zombie-form damage to towers by 50%. The implicit ruling: this was a viable strategic playstyle exploiting a passive, not griefing. The strategy is largely non-viable now after the nerfs, but the precedent stands.
The semantic drift the term "inting" went through maps directly onto the Sion case. "Int" originally meant intentional (the etymology is "intentional" → abbreviated to "int" as a verb → gerund "inting"). Inting Sion is intentional dying. By the strict definition, it is inting. By the modern community definition (= griefing), it is not. Both definitions are in use, which is why arguments about whether someone is "inting" usually go nowhere.
Disruptive Behavior Repair: Riot Pays You Back
Until 2026, getting an inter on your team was a pure tax: you lost LP, you lost time, and the inter eventually got a chat restriction or a ban that did not refund anything to you. Disruptive Behavior Repair, updated April 3, 2026, changed that.
How it works:
- If a teammate is verified by the Instant Feedback System as having intentionally fed (not just played badly), the system flags games they ruined.
- Ranked games: affected teammates receive a full LP refund (the LP they lost is returned) plus Autofill Protection on their next queue.
- Quick Play (level 10+): affected teammates receive Autofill Protection only.
- The compensation is automatic and retroactive after the offender's account is actioned, which is why it can show up days after the game.
Two important constraints. First, the offender has to be verified by Riot's detection, not just reported. A 0/15 score is not enough; the system has to determine intent. Second, Riot reported a 99.95% detection accuracy figure in mid-2025, which is the figure they used to justify rolling out tougher punishments alongside the repair system. The system errs heavily on the side of not actioning false positives, which means some real inting goes unactioned, but it also means the LP refunds and Autofill Protection apply to verified cases only.
Penalties for Inting in League of Legends
The standard escalation path for verified intentional feeding follows Riot's Instant Feedback System FAQ:
- Chat restriction. First-tier penalty. The player can still queue but cannot type in chat for a set number of games.
- 14-day suspension. Second-tier. Account locked out of all queues.
- Permanent ban. Third-tier. Account permanently locked.
Penalties are typically issued within about 15 minutes of the game ending. The system can also apply: low-priority queue, queue lockout, Honor demotion (drop to Honor 1), Honor and Hextech progression locks, and forced account renaming. Repeat ranked offenders increasingly face "aggressive ranked queues" rather than being routed back to Normals, which is the 2025 enforcement direction.
Hard inting (running it down mid, repeated suicidal dives, abandoning lane to die in jungle) is the most reliably detected behavior. Soft inting takes more games and more reports before the system has enough confidence to action.
How to Report Inting
The post-game lobby has a report flow with named categories. The relevant one is Intentional Feeding. For passive griefing without flagrant deaths, Gameplay Sabotage or Griefing is the closer match.
A few things worth knowing about how reports actually work:
- Riot uses a reporting confidence system. Reports from players who consistently identify real disruptive behavior count more than reports from players who report everyone every game.
- Spam-reporting does not increase the chance of action. If anything, it lowers your reporting confidence weight.
- The system uses compound data across multiple games. One report on one game rarely actions an account on its own; many reports across many games against the same player do.
- You can confirm a report led to action: the post-game "your report led to a punishment" notification fires when the IFS bans or restricts an account you reported.
How to Avoid Being Falsely Flagged
Real bad games happen. The detection system is built around not punishing players who play badly while trying to win, but if you want to stay clearly on the right side of it:
- Stay in lane. Hard inting is defined visually by walking your champion into the enemy repeatedly. Stay in your lane, farm under tower, recall when low. Even an 0/10 game where you played defensively reads completely differently to the system than 0/10 with repeated mid-lane suicide runs.
- Don't abandon objectives. The classic soft-inting pattern is "team is at Baron, I'm farming a side lane and ignoring pings." Group when your team groups, even if you think the call is wrong.
- Use pings, not chat rage. The IFS reads chat logs as part of compound behavioral data. Tilted chat plus a bad score reads worse than a bad score alone.
- Don't AFK in fountain. Sitting in base while alive is one of the easier patterns to detect and is treated as gameplay sabotage.
- Don't queue tilted. Most false-flag risk comes from playing several frustrated games in a row where your behavior pattern starts looking less like "trying to win" and more like "checked out."
The single sentence version: if you're losing badly, lose normally. Farm, defend, take fights when your team takes fights. The detection system is looking for intent, and intent shows up across patterns of behavior, not single deaths.
