Leeching

• leecher (gaming), the term used for a person that benefits in a first person shooter, by having his team mates carry him to a win.
• In pre-scientific medicine, leeching was an alternative form of blood letting in which "bad" blood would be removed via leeches instead of by bleeding.
• Leeching may also refer to the practice of benefitting from others' actions without contributing in kind. For example:
  • In peer-to-peer file sharing networks, leeching is downloading while uploading little or nothing.
  • In bittorrent, leeching is only downloading, while not sharing pieces of what you have downloaded with others. This is, however, luckily practically removed by the use of a tracker, which moniters your up/down ratio and speeds up your downloads if you upload more, or even doesn't let you download at all if you don't mantain a certain quota. All leechers are subject to Leecher's law

• • More generally, it is used as a term for certain types of bandwidth theft.
  • In online computer games (especially role-playing games), leeching refers to the practice of a player joining a group for the explicit purpose of gaining rewards without contributing anything to the efforts necessary to acquire those rewards. Sometimes this is allowed in an effort to powerlevel a player. Usually it is considered poor behavior to do this without permission from the group.