On Successful Team Formation: Statistical Analysis of a Multiplayer Online Game

Teamwork plays an important role in many areas of today's society, such as business activities. Thus, the question of how to form an effective team is of increasing interest. In this paper we use the team-oriented multiplayer online game Dota 2 to study cooperation within teams and the success of teams. Making use of game log data, we choose a statistical approach to identify factors that increase the chance of a team to win. The factors that we analyze are related to the roles that players can take within the game, the experiences of the players and friendship ties within a team. Our results show that such data can be used to infer social behavior patterns.