Skill-Based Differences in Spatio-Temporal Team Behavior in Defence of The Ancients 2
This provides insights into skill-based differences in team coordination for MOBA players and researchers, but is incremental as it applies existing data-driven measures to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of quantifying spatio-temporal team behavior in the MOBA game DotA 2, finding that professional teams exhibit smaller within-team distances and more zone changes than amateur teams, with distinct temporal patterns across skill levels.
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are among the most played digital games in the world. In these games, teams of players fight against each other in arena environments, and the gameplay is focused on tactical combat. Mastering MOBAs requires extensive practice, as is exemplified in the popular MOBA Defence of the Ancients 2 (DotA 2). In this paper, we present three data-driven measures of spatio-temporal behavior in DotA 2: 1) Zone changes; 2) Distribution of team members and: 3) Time series clustering via a fuzzy approach. We present a method for obtaining accurate positional data from DotA 2. We investigate how behavior varies across these measures as a function of the skill level of teams, using four tiers from novice to professional players. Results indicate that spatio-temporal behavior of MOBA teams is related to team skill, with professional teams having smaller within-team distances and conducting more zone changes than amateur teams. The temporal distribution of the within-team distances of professional and high-skilled teams also generally follows patterns distinct from lower skill ranks.