[2022] Is there YET ANOTHER funnel yi strat going around right now?

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.

That is one way of interpreting. The other way is that we run a live service game that balances around player trends and metas, and spending time trying to anticipate the player behavior of millions of unique users will never result in the same quality of game for players as reacting to the feedback they are giving. If we did only internal testing and ignored what players ACTUALLY did on live, the narrative would be “Riot doesn’t listen to their players” or “Doesn’t Riot play their own game and see that X is OP?”.

It’s a balancing act. We do plenty of internal testing but testing funnel (played by .001% of players) vs testing a common pick (played in 5% of games) is an easy decision.

Yeah to be fair with the cookies, they went through a LOT of code changes (to fix bugs) which introduced functionality pretty late in testing that we weren’t aware of. Intuitively I (like you) would expect 0 cookies without smite so I never tested it personally or asked someone about it, but at any time that could have been inadvertently added and nobody checked. That’s how these bugs (and therefore exploitative gameplay patterns) hit live.

But, just like how we talk about it now, it’s very easily fixable.

Likely we will do something like: If you don’t have jungle item, you get no cookies.

If that nerfs that strat then yes, I’m unfamiliar with the shaco double jungle.