The Proficiency-Congruency Dilemma: Virtual Team Design and Performance in Multiplayer Online Games

TL;DR

This study investigates how team design choices in multiplayer online games affect performance, revealing that individual proficiency has a greater impact than role congruency, with insights from large-scale data and player focus groups.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-methods approach to analyze team design in online games, highlighting the relative importance of proficiency over congruency in team performance.

Findings

Player proficiency has a stronger positive effect on team performance.

Team congruency contributes less to performance improvements.

Large-scale data confirms the significance of individual expertise.

Abstract

Multiplayer online battle arena games provide an excellent opportunity to study team performance. When designing a team, players must negotiate a \textit{proficiency-congruency dilemma} between selecting roles that best match their experience and roles that best complement the existing roles on the team. We adopt a mixed-methods approach to explore how users negotiate this dilemma. Using data from \textit{League of Legends}, we define a similarity space to operationalize team design constructs about role proficiency, generality, and congruency. We collect publicly available data from 3.36 million users to test the influence of these constructs on team performance. We also conduct focus groups with novice and elite players to understand how players' team design practices vary with expertise. We find that player proficiency increases team performance more than team congruency. These findings have implications for players, designers, and theorists about how to recommend team designs that jointly prioritize individuals' expertise and teams' compatibility.