Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Games: Attractive Matchmaking via Group Role Assignment

The prisoner’s dilemma (PD) is one of the most popular concepts in scientific literature. This concept is widely used to study various social interactions where participants choose to give up or cooperate in an uninformed environment. This article finds that the matchmaking problem, such as in multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games, is a PD problem under mixed preferences (PDUMP). To achieve efficient and feasible matching in MOBA, this article formalizes the problem via group role assignment (GRA). By extending GRA, a new PDUMP solution is proposed. By considering players’ positive and negative preferences, game managers can quickly match players to games. This ensures game fairness and strives to meet participant needs as much as possible. Large-scale experiments verify the effectiveness and practicability of the method and prove that the proposed method can improve the degree of player matching satisfaction.