DraftRec

Abstract

This paper presents a personalized character recommendation system for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games which are considered as one of the most popular online video game genres around the world. When playing MOBA games, players go through a draft stage, where they alternately select a virtual character to play. When drafting, players select characters by not only considering their character preferences, but also the synergy and competence of their team's character combination. However, the complexity of drafting induces difficulties for beginners to choose the appropriate characters based on the characters of their team and their play styles. To alleviate this problem, we propose DraftRec, a novel hierarchical model which recommends characters by considering each player's play style and the interaction between the players. DraftRec consists of two networks: the player network and the match network. The player network captures the individual player's play style, and the match network integrates the complex relationship between the players and their respective champions. We train and evaluate our model from manually collected 280,000 matches of League of Legends and a publicly available 50,000 matches of Dota2. Empirically, our method achieved state-of-the-art performance for the character recommendation and match outcome prediction task. Furthermore, a comprehensive user survey confirms that DraftRec provides convincing and satisfying recommendations for real-world players.