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.