MOBA: a New Arena for Game AI
It addresses the lack of AI research in popular MOBA games, which could benefit game AI developers, but is incremental as it primarily introduces a new domain rather than a breakthrough method.
The paper identifies MOBA games as an underexplored testbed for AI research and proposes a discrete model to understand the game's challenges, aiming to encourage its use as a novel research platform.
Games have always been popular testbeds for Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the last decade, we have seen the rise of the Multiple Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, which are the most played games nowadays. In spite of this, there are few works that explore MOBA as a testbed for AI Research. In this paper we present and discuss the main features and opportunities offered by MOBA games to Game AI Research. We describe the various challenges faced along the game and also propose a discrete model that can be used to better understand and explore the game. With this, we aim to encourage the use of MOBA as a novel research platform for Game AI.