A recommender system for hero line-ups in MOBA games

Abstract

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are currently one the most popular online game genres. In their basic gameplay, two teams of multiple players compete against each other to destroy the enemy’s base, controlling a powerful unit known as “hero”. Each hero has different abilities, roles and strengths. Thus, choosing a good combination of heroes is fundamental for the success in the game. In this paper we propose a recommendation system for selecting heroes in a MOBA game. We develop a mechanism based on association rules that suggests the more suitable heroes for composing a team, using data collected from a large number of DOTA 2 matches. For evaluating the efficacy of the line-up, we trained a neural network capable of predicting the winner team with a 88.63% accuracy. The results of the recommendation system were very satisfactory with up to 74.9% success rate.