tank check

A character with high health who absorbs damage for their team. As a verb: "to tank damage" = to take hits for the team. Extended to real life — "I tanked that meeting" means you took the heat. Universally respected role in any competitive setting.

A tanker is someone who takes hits — literal or metaphorical — and keeps moving. In gaming circles, the tanker is the teammate who absorbs enemy focus so others can thrive. In broader slang, calling someone a tanker is acknowledging their capacity to endure: a friend who processes everyone else's drama without cracking, a coworker who takes on impossible projects and somehow delivers. There's genuine respect baked into the word. Tankers aren't glamorous. They don't get the highlight reel. They get the quiet acknowledgment of people who understand what it costs.

A call-out or self-assessment determining whether someone is playing intentionally badly in a game — deliberately dying, feeding kills, or throwing objectives on purpose. Dropping an int check on a teammate is equal parts accusation and interrogation: are you actually this bad or is something deliberate happening here? The check invites either a confession, a defensive explanation, or a meltdown in chat. A staple of competitive gaming communication, it has migrated into everyday discourse to question whether someone's terrible decision-making is wilful or just genuinely catastrophic.