Evaluating Team Skill Aggregation in Online Competitive Games

TL;DR

This study evaluates methods for aggregating individual player skills into team skill ratings in online competitive games, finding that the MAX method often best predicts team performance across various rating systems and datasets.

Contribution

The paper introduces two new team skill aggregation methods and compares them with a standard approach across multiple rating systems and real-world datasets.

Findings

MAX method outperforms other aggregation methods in most cases

Team performance is best predicted by the most skilled member

Results suggest need for more comprehensive team performance metrics

Abstract

One of the main goals of online competitive games is increasing player engagement by ensuring fair matches. These games use rating systems for creating balanced match-ups. Rating systems leverage statistical estimation to rate players' skills and use skill ratings to predict rank before matching players. Skill ratings of individual players can be aggregated to compute the skill level of a team. While research often aims to improve the accuracy of skill estimation and fairness of match-ups, less attention has been given to how the skill level of a team is calculated from the skill level of its members. In this paper, we propose two new aggregation methods and compare them with a standard approach extensively used in the research literature. We present an exhaustive analysis of the impact of these methods on the predictive performance of rating systems. We perform our experiments using three popular rating systems, Elo, Glicko, and TrueSkill, on three real-world datasets including over 100,000 battle royale and head-to-head matches. Our evaluations show the superiority of the MAX method over the other two methods in the majority of the tested cases, implying that the overall performance of a team is best determined by the performance of its most skilled member. The results of this study highlight the necessity of devising more elaborated methods for calculating a team's performance -- methods covering different aspects of players' behavior such as skills, strategy, or goals.