What Makes a Good Team? A Large-scale Study on the Effect of Team Composition in Honor of Kings

Abstract: Team composition is a central factor in determining the effectiveness of a team. In this paper, we present a large-scale study on the effect of team composition on multiple measures of team effectiveness. We use a dataset from the largest multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, Honor of Kings, with 96 million matches involving 100 million players. We measure team effectiveness based on team performance (whether a team is going to win), team tenacity (whether a team is going to surrender), and team rapport (whether a team uses abusive language). Our results confirm the importance of team diversity and show that diversity has varying effects on team effectiveness: although diverse teams perform well and show tenacity in adversity, they are more likely to abuse when losing than less diverse teams. Our study also contributes to the situation vs. personality debate and show that abusive players tend to choose the leading role and players do not become more abusive when taking such roles. We further demonstrate the predictive power of features based on team composition in prediction experiments.