Analysis of ELO Rating Scheme in MOBA Games

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the use of the ELO rating system in MOBA games, discussing its advantages, drawbacks, and proposing a new rating method with comparative simulations.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of ELO's strengths and weaknesses in online gaming and introduces a novel rating scheme evaluated through simulations.

Findings

ELO helps balance competitive matches but has limitations.

Players generally dislike ELO despite its effectiveness.

A new rating scheme shows promising improvements in simulations.

Abstract

ELO rating system is proposed by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. Originally, it was proposed for the ranking system of chess players, but it was soon adapted to many other zero-sum sports fields like football, baseball, basketball , etc. Nowadays, besides the traditional sports games, computer/video games are also playing an important role in social lives especially among the teenagers. In most of the online competition games, player's performance is usually scored and recorded by the game's ranking system. Meanwhile, ranking system like ladder in Dota is not the only the metric for the players to evaluate their gaming strength, an ELO rating score based on players in-game performance is also a decisive factor for gamers' matching. Namely, the matching system will refer to players' score in the ranking system and performance score system to ensure the matched players will promisingly undergo a balanced game without one team dramatically overwhelming the other. ELO scheme and its variants in modern online competition games aims to ensuring the expected winning rate for each team approaches 50\%. However, ELO rating is also causing compliments among players. In this research, I will dig into the advantages and drawbacks of leveraging ELO ranking system in online games and why it is still employed by game developers despite the fact that it is disliked by most of the players. Also, a new effort based rating scheme will be proposed and compared with ELO scheme under the simulation environment.