Funneling is back in League of Legends and fans are mad

Funneling in League of Legends is perhaps the most-hated strategy in the history of the game, revolving around super-charging a single player on one team. And now it’s back.

Funneling previously showed up in League of Legends with mid laners picking supportive champions instead of traditional options, and alternating between helping the intended super carry and holding minions in mid lane for the funneling target to collect.

Previously, it involved the mid laner giving up their strength in order to give their smite-wielding carry more gold and experience, but the funneling in Preseason 2023 is taking on a new form.

Preseason 2023 brings funneling back to League of Legends

The new funneling tactic is one that briefly reared its head when the previous iteration of jungle items showed up, with the mid laner taking Smite and Flash as their summoner spells. From there, the mid laner will help their jungler by smiting their first camp, and then farming out their lane as normal.

After a while, the mid laner will buy and then immediately sell their jungling item, but due to the way that the new jungle items are coded, the “Treats” passive which gives gold for various tasks will remain. This is meant to make the jungle more rewarding for junglers to take, but since it functions without the jungle item in the player’s inventory, mid laners are using this to cash in on gold.

This isn’t the first time an unintended interaction has broken League of Legends.

Riot Games have already responded to this development, with Ray “RayYonggi” Williams commenting on Reddit to inform the community that developers are away.

He explained: “This is known and we have mitigating tactics in mind. To refer to your point about testing, no we didn’t test funnel extensively. We spend a majority of the preseason dev time on tuning the game for the 99.9%, and when a niche abuse case pops up (like funnel) we ensure we have the levers to fix it when it does. Rather than spend time inefficiently anticipating, testing, and mitigating these strategies pre-ship, we instead observe preseason and make adjustments at 5% the cost.”