No Arabic abstract
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games have received increasing worldwide popularity recently. In such games, players compete in teams against each other by controlling selected game avatars, each of which is designed with different strengths and weaknesses. Intuitively, putting together game avatars that complement each other (synergy) and suppress those of opponents (opposition) would result in a stronger team. In-depth understanding of synergy and opposition relationships among game avatars benefits player in making decisions in game avatar drafting and gaining better prediction of match events. However, due to intricate design and complex interactions between game avatars, thorough understanding of their relationships is not a trivial task. In this paper, we propose a latent variable model, namely Game Avatar Embedding (GAE), to learn avatars numerical representations which encode synergy and opposition relationships between pairs of avatars. The merits of our model are twofold: (1) the captured synergy and opposition relationships are sensible to experienced human players perception; (2) the learned numerical representations of game avatars allow many important downstream tasks, such as similar avatar search, match outcome prediction, and avatar pick recommender. To our best knowledge, no previous model is able to simultaneously support both features. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations on real match data from three commercial MOBA games illustrate the benefits of our model.
Successful analysis of player skills in video games has important impacts on the process of enhancing player experience without undermining their continuous skill development. Moreover, player skill analysis becomes more intriguing in team-based video games because such form of study can help discover useful factors in effective team formation. In this paper, we consider the problem of skill decomposition in MOBA (MultiPlayer Online Battle Arena) games, with the goal to understand what player skill factors are essential for the outcome of a game match. To understand the construct of MOBA player skills, we utilize various skill-based predictive models to decompose player skills into interpretative parts, the impact of which are assessed in statistical terms. We apply this analysis approach on two widely known MOBAs, namely League of Legends (LoL) and Defense of the Ancients 2 (DOTA2). The finding is that base skills of in-game avatars, base skills of players, and players champion-specific skills are three prominent skill components influencing LoLs match outcomes, while those of DOTA2 are mainly impacted by in-game avatars base skills but not much by the other two.
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games have received increasing popularity recently. In a match of such games, players compete in two teams of five, each controlling an in-game avatars, known as heroes, selected from a roster of more than 100. The selection of heroes, also known as pick or draft, takes place before the match starts and alternates between the two teams until each player has selected one hero. Heroes are designed with different strengths and weaknesses to promote team cooperation in a game. Intuitively, heroes in a strong team should complement each others strengths and suppressing those of opponents. Hero drafting is therefore a challenging problem due to the complex hero-to-hero relationships to consider. In this paper, we propose a novel hero recommendation system that suggests heroes to add to an existing team while maximizing the teams prospect for victory. To that end, we model the drafting between two teams as a combinatorial game and use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for estimating the values of hero combinations. Our empirical evaluation shows that hero teams drafted by our recommendation algorithm have significantly higher win rate against teams constructed by other baseline and state-of-the-art strategies.
This paper presents the design of a cooperative multi-player betting game, Trust-ya, as a model of some elements of status processes in human groups. The game is designed to elicit status-driven leader-follower behaviours as a means to observe and influence social hierarchy. It involves a Bach/Stravinsky game of deference in a group, in which people on each turn can either invest with another player or hope someone invests with them. Players who receive investment capital are able to gamble for payoffs from a central pool which then can be shared back with those who invested (but a portion of it may be kept, including all of it). The bigger gambles (people with more investors) get bigger payoffs. Thus, there is a natural tendency for players to coalesce as investors around a leader who gambles, but who also shares sufficiently from their winnings to keep the investors hanging on. The leader will want to keep as much as possible for themselves, however. The game is played anonymously, but a set of status symbols can be purchased which have no value in the game itself, but can serve as a cheap talk communication device with other players. This paper introduces the game, relates it to status theory in social psychology, and shows some simple simulated and human experiments that demonstrate how the game can be used to study status processes and dynamics in human groups.
Access to online contents represents a large share of the Internet traffic. Most such contents are multimedia items which are user-generated, i.e., posted online by the contents owners. In this paper we focus on how those who provide contents can leverage online platforms in order to profit from their large base of potential viewers. Actually, platforms like Vimeo or YouTube provide tools to accelerate the dissemination of contents, i.e., recommendation lists and other re-ranking mechanisms. Hence, the popularity of a content can be increased by paying a cost for advertisement: doing so, it will appear with some priority in the recommendation lists and will be accessed more frequently by the platform users. Ultimately, such acceleration mechanism engenders a competition among online contents to gain popularity. In this context, our focus is on the structure of the acceleration strategies which a content provider should use in order to optimally promote a content given a certain daily budget. Such a best response indeed depends on the strategies adopted by competing content providers. Also, it is a function of the potential popularity of a content and the fee paid for the platform advertisement service. We formulate the problem as a differential game and we solve it for the infinite horizon case by deriving the structure of certain Nash equilibria of the game.
Recommending products to consumers means not only understanding their tastes, but also understanding their level of experience. For example, it would be a mistake to recommend the iconic film Seven Samurai simply because a user enjoys other action movies; rather, we might conclude that they will eventually enjoy it -- once they are ready. The same is true for beers, wines, gourmet foods -- or any products where users have acquired tastes: the `best products may not be the most `accessible. Thus our goal in this paper is to recommend products that a user will enjoy now, while acknowledging that their tastes may have changed over time, and may change again in the future. We model how tastes change due to the very act of consuming more products -- in other words, as users become more experienced. We develop a latent factor recommendation system that explicitly accounts for each users level of experience. We find that such a model not only leads to better recommendations, but also allows us to study the role of user experience and expertise on a novel dataset of fifteen million beer, wine, food, and movie reviews.