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J. Neidhardt, Y. Huang, N. Contractor:
"Assembly factors influencing the victor in head to head short duration team competitions in a multiplayer online battle arena game";
Vortrag: 2014-Sunbelt XXXIV, St. Pete Beach, FL, USA; 10.02.2014 - 16.02.2014.

While network approaches are used to study how the assembly of teams impacts their performance, there has been little attention to assess the impact of assembly on the relative performance of two teams in a head to head contest. In this study, we focus specifically on assembly factors that influence performance of short-duration contests in mid-sized teams playing a multiplayer online game, Dota2, where two teams consisting of five players each compete with each other. We determine the attributes and relational factors that help a team to defeat the opponent. Among attributes we consider the players´ skills as well as the diversity of their skills and their roles. Relational factors include the friendship relations within a team, previous co-playing experiences of team members as well as the embeddedness of the team, i.e., whether team members belong to a community that often plays together. We use game log data for short matches (under 30 minutes) within Dota2 to empirically test this model. We find that teams with players who have more diverse roles are more likely to win. We also find some evidence that teams consisting of players who have focused on training their fighting skills rather than on non-fighting skills have an advantage. However, when relational factors are included in the model, some skill factors are no longer significant. Instead, friendship ties between team members as well as the embeddedness of the team within the community have a positive impact on the likelihood of a team to win.