DOTA 2 bot competition

Abstract

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games are a recent huge success both in the video game industry and the international eSports scene. These games encourage team coordination and cooperation, short and long-term planning, within a real-time combined action and strategy gameplay. Artificial intelligence (AI) and computational intelligence (CI) in games research competitions offer a wide variety of challenges regarding the study and application of AI techniques to different game genres. These events are widely accepted by the AI/CI community as a sort of AI benchmarking that strongly influences many other research areas in the field. This paper presents and describes in detail the Dota 2 (Defense of the Ancients 2) Bot competition and the Dota 2 AI framework that supports it. This challenge aims to join both the MOBAs and AI/CI game competitions, inviting participants to submit AI controllers for the successful MOBA Dota 2 to play in 1v1 matches, which aims for fostering research on AI techniques for real-time games. The Dota 2 AI framework makes use of the actual Dota 2 game modding capabilities to enable to connect external AI controllers to actual Dota 2 game matches using the original F2P game.