The RIOT Act

[Ashe]

What exactly is backdoor?

I'm going to give you two definitions - one is the actual definition and origin of the term, and one is the commonly used definition, which is better defined by a different term altogether.

Backdooring originated in DotA. Originally, towers and barracks (essentially inhibitors) AND YOUR FOUNTAIN (nexus) had no invulnerability due to others being up. You could destroy them in any order, if you chose to. Therefore, there was a specific champ that was released (who's name escapes me) that could teleport. So for the entire game, he would teleport to the enemy team's fountain and just suicide as much damage on it as he could. They didn't regen like the Nexus in LoL does, so this dmg mattered. Then, every time the champ respawned, he'd just immediately teleport up and do as much dmg as he could again. Similar to Twisted Fate, in some ways, but not exactly.

It couldn't be dealt with. DotA had no "recall" ability, nor summoner spells (so no "teleport" spell). You would have to farm the gold to buy a Scroll to teleport back with that would be consumed on use. Even if you DID this repeatedly (letting the other four enemy players continue to play without changing their play), this "Twisted Fate" champ would ignore you and just continue attacking the fountain until he died, just to get as much dmg as he could on it. After enough times doing this, he would take the fountain regardless of what you did. The only way to stop it was to kill the opposing fountain first, essentially creating this giant timer of when a loss was inevitable.

People called it "Backdooring" or "bd" for short. Later they patched in a few methods to deal with it, as well as made it considered an exploit (which is basically what it was).

Both HoN and LoL put mechanics in that prevent this from happening, such as towers being invulnerable unless the tower before it is destroyed. So now, if someone complains about "that bding faggot yi", they mean what is more appropriately referred to as "creepskipping". Essentially, enemy champion, whether it is TF, Yi, Tristana, whoever, bypasses the creepwave and just tanks the tower, trying to either kill it before dying or does as much dmg as he can before peacing out. They don't bother to escort a creep wave to the tower because its unnecessary. Sometimes an entire team will do this (often actually) with the tank just "tanking" the tower hits.

If your inhibitor tower, inhibitor, or nexus turrets are weak and the enemy team has a Yi or TF on their team, absolutely expect that they will start pressuring those towers at every possible opportunity. If you notice a team where strong AD characters have Teleport, expect them to do this. It CAN be countered (though in Blind Pick, its MUCH more difficult to deal with) and its a perfectly legit and acceptable tactic. So if you go push a tower and someone screams "u fkin bd noob", ignore them and continue what you are doing. Riot (and S2 for HoN) have said its acceptable, its not an exploit (in the way these games allow it), it is VERY frustrating, and people are full of shit when they say "u can get banned for bd bitch!", because that's 100% bullshit despite people regularly trying to make that claim. They say this because they don't like the tactic and have a moral opposition to doing things that win the game, expecting you to play on their terms.

And yes, it will piss me off when someone does it to me but that's an issue on my end, not theirs. So in this game, if someone calls it "backdooring", they mean "creepskipping" (aka skipping the creep wave and just tanking the hits yourself), though a good number of the time they (and I) mean "let a wave push to the tower and I didn't pay attention for any number of reasons so holy fuck I need to suddenly respond fml".