Player Behavior and Optimal Team Composition for Online Multiplayer Games

We consider clustering player behavior and learning the optimal team composition for multiplayer online games. The goal is to determine a set of descriptive play style groupings and learn a predictor for win/loss outcomes. The predictor takes in as input the play styles of the participants in each team; i.e., the various team compositions in a game. Our framework uses unsupervised learning to find behavior clusters, which are, in turn, used with classification algorithms to learn the outcome predictor. For our numerical experiments, we consider League of Legends, a popular team-based role-playing game developed by Riot Games. We observe the learned clusters to not only corroborate well with game knowledge, but also provide insights surprising to expert players. We also demonstrate that game outcomes can be predicted with fairly high accuracy given team composition-based features.