Discovering the effect of hero choice on the outcome of a Dota 2 game
N.E. Toksoy (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
J.H. Krijthe – Mentor (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)
R.K.A. Karlsson – Mentor (TU Delft - Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)
K Hildebrandt – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
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This is the link to the GitHub repository used for the project.
https://github.com/noyant/research-project-dota2 https://figshare.com/s/d0d019862fbe2bc5fbc6Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Dota 2 is one of the most popular MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games being played today. A Dota 2 match is played by two teams of 5 players. The main goal of the game is to destroy the opposing team’s Ancient tower, the team that manages to do so, wins the game. An essential part of a match is the hero selection phase before it starts. There are different ways to select heroes in different game modes, but the game mode that is used for this research is the Captain’s mode where each team is assigned a captain and the captains take turns picking and banning heroes. The main question that this research aims to answer is: “What is the effect of the Pudge hero being picked in a team on the outcome of a Dota 2 game?” Causal inference, a discipline that is concerned with discovering causal relationships using data analysis under certain assumptions about the data is used in this research to measure this effect. More specifically, the g-formula is the causal inference method of choice for this research. The data that is used for this research is gathered through the OpenDota API. After running the correctly formatted data through the g-formula implementation, the effect of the Pudge hero being picked in a team on the game outcome was estimated as -0.2848%. Meaning that, on average, there is a 0.2848% less chance of a team winning the game, if the Pudge hero is in that team.