MOBA-Slice: A Time Slice Based

Evaluation Framework of Relative Advantage

between Teams in MOBA Games

Lijun Yu1,2 , Dawei Zhang2 , Xiangqun Chen1 , and Xing Xie2

1
Peking University yulijun@pku.edu.cn, cherry@sei.pku.edu.cn
arXiv:1807.08360v1 [cs.LG] 22 Jul 2018

2
Microsoft Research Asia zhangdawei@outlook.com,
xing.xie@microsoft.com

Abstract. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) is currently one of the most
popular genres of digital games around the world. The domain of knowledge con-
tained in these complicated games is large. It is hard for humans and algorithms
to evaluate the real-time game situation or predict the game result. In this paper,
we introduce MOBA-Slice, a time slice based evaluation framework of relative
advantage between teams in MOBA games. MOBA-Slice is a quantitative evalua-
tion method based on learning, similar to the value network of AlphaGo. It estab-
lishes a foundation for further MOBA related research including AI development.
In MOBA-Slice, with an analysis of the deciding factors of MOBA game results,
we design a neural network model to fit our discounted evaluation function. Then
we apply MOBA-Slice to Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA2), a typical and popu-
lar MOBA game. Experiments on a large number of match replays show that our
model works well on arbitrary matches. MOBA-Slice not only has an accuracy
3.7% higher than DotA Plus Assistant3 at result prediction, but also supports the
prediction of the remaining time of a game, and then realizes the evaluation of
relative advantage between teams.

Keywords: Computer Games · Applications of Supervised Learning · Game

Playing and Machine Learning

1 Introduction

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) is a sub-genre of strategy video games. Play-
ers of two teams each control a playable character competing to destroy the opposing
team’s main structure, with the assistance of periodically spawned computer-controlled
units. Figure 1(a)4 is a typical map of a MOBA genre game. MOBA is currently one of
the most popular genres of digital games around the world. Among championships of
MOBA globally, Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA2) has the most generously awarded
tournaments. DotA2 is a typical MOBA game in which two teams of five players col-
lectively destroy enemy’s structure, Ancient, while defending their own. The playable
3
A subscription service provided by DotA2
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_MOBA.svg
2 L. Yu et al.

characters are called heroes, each of which has its unique design, strengths, and weak-
nesses. The two teams, Radiant and Dire, occupy fortified bases called plateau in oppo-
site corners of the map as Figure 1(b)5 shows.

(a) A Typical MOBA Map (b) DotA 2 Mini Map

Fig. 1: Maps

In games with a scoring mechanism, we can easily tell which player or team has an
advantage from the scores. But the design of MOBA games such as DotA2 is compli-
cated, with lots of variables changing during the whole game. So it is hard to evaluate
the real-time game situation in such a large domain of knowledge. Traditionally, players
and commentators assess the relative advantage by intuitive feeling, their own experi-
ence and fuzzy methods. No unified standard has been proposed, to the best of our
knowledge. Such evaluation is needed in further research related to MOBA. It plays an
essential role in developing artificial intelligence for MOBA games, such as working
as the reward function in reinforcement learning models [20] or the evaluation function
in Monte Carlo planning models [5]. In strategy analysis, the effectiveness of strategies
can also be estimated by the change of relative advantage between teams.
In this paper, we introduce MOBA-Slice, which is able to evaluate any time slice of
a game quantitatively. Different from manually designed evaluation function, MOBA-
Slice provides a model that learns from data, which is similar to the value network of
AlphaGo [18]. It establishes a foundation for further MOBA related research including
AI development and strategy analysis.
The main contribution of this paper is listed below.
1. We introduce MOBA-Slice, a time slice based evaluation framework of relative ad-
vantage between teams in MOBA games. We analyze the deciding factors of MOBA
game result. A discounted evaluation function is defined to compute the relative ad-
vantage. We design a supervised learning model based on Neural Network to do this
5
https://dota2.gamepedia.com/File:Minimap_7.07.png
 MOBA-Slice: An Evaluation Framework of MOBA Games 3

evaluation. MOBA-Slice is able to predict the result and remaining time of ongoing
matches.
2. We apply MOBA-Slice to DotA2 and prove the effectiveness of MOBA-Slice with
experiments. We embody MOBA-Slice on a typical MOBA game, DotA2. We pro-
cess a large number of DotA2 match replays to train our model. Experiments show
that the model is able to evaluate time slices of arbitrary DotA2 matches. In the as-
pect of predicting the game result, MOBA-Slice has an accuracy 3.7% higher than
DotA Plus Assistant.

2 MOBA-Slice

2.1 MOBA Game Result Analysis

In a MOBA game, the final victory is of the most significance. MOBA Game Result
(MGR) analysis is defined to describe the deciding factors of the result of a match. For
a certain time point, the future result of the game is considered related to two aspects,
current state and future trend. The current state describes the game situation at this
specific time slice, which is the foundation of future development. The future trend
represents how the match will develop from the current state. Figure 2 shows the content
of MGR analysis.

Fig. 2: MGR Analysis

In details, the current state includes every information we can get to know about the
game from a particular time slice. As MOBA are multiplayer games where each player
controls one character, we further divide the factors of current status into individual and
global state. The individual state contains the information of each character, includ-
ing its type, attributes such as position and experience, statistics such as the count of
4 L. Yu et al.

deaths, the items it possesses, the skills it masters, and so on. The global state describes
the background environment and the relationship between characters. The global infor-
mation includes the lineup depicting the types of characters in both teams. Lineup can
also reveal the advantage or disadvantage of a specific combination of characters. The
position and selected route of characters, the status of creeps and buildings are consid-
ered in global state, as well. All the information mentioned above that will be used to
represent current state can be found in game records, such as replay files.
Different from the current state, the part of future trend focuses on the level of
players. Given the same status as a start, different players and teams will have distinct
game processes and lead to various game results. We also divide this part into individual
ability and team cooperation. The ability of each player individually can be measured
through ranking systems such as TrueSkill [16, 8]. We further include the part of team
cooperation, as good members do not necessarily mean a strong team. The detailed
method to evaluate team cooperation still requires further research and is not covered
in this paper.

2.2 Discounted Evaluation

MGR analysis describes how the result of a match comes out, and reversely we can use
the future result to evaluate the current states. In Q learning [23], the discount factor
γ represents the difference in importance between future rewards and present rewards.
1
We can let γ = 1+r , where r is the discount rate. The current value of a reward Ra after
time t is calculated by γ t Ra . Inspired by this, in the evaluation of current situation, we
regard the future victory as a reward. The farther we are from the victory, the less the
current value of its reward is. We use the logarithmic form of discount factor to simplify
exponent operation.

Definition 1. The function of discounted evaluation DE for a time slice TS is defined

as:
1 R
DETS (R, t) = ×R= (1)
ln(1 + r)t αt
where α = ln(1 + r), t is the remaining time of the game, and
(
1, when Team A wins
R= (2)
−1, when Team B wins

DETS has several appealing properties:

1. The sign of its value represents the final result, positive for A’s victory, negative for
B’s.
2. Its absolute value is inversely proportional to t.
3. The value approximately represents the advantage team A has in comparison to
team B.

Here is some explanation of property 3. In normal cognition, greater advantage indi-

cates more probability of winning, which would result in less time to end the game. So
 MOBA-Slice: An Evaluation Framework of MOBA Games 5

we can suppose that there is a negative correlation between the advantage gap between
two teams and t. This assumption may be challenged by the intuition that the game sit-
uation fluctuates and even reverses at times. We can divide such fluctuation into random
and systematic ones. The players’ faults that occur randomly can be smoothed in a large
scale of data. Systematic fluctuation is considered to be the result of misinterpretation
of advantage. For example, in games where team A wins, if the intuitionistic advantage
of team A usually gets smaller after certain time slice x, there is a reason to doubt that
the advantage of team A at x is over-estimated. Traditional ways to evaluate advantage
usually ignores the potential fluctuation and does not take game progress into consider-
ation. In our method, we can suppose the absolute value of the advantage between teams
keeps growing from the beginning as a small value till the end. The value of function
DETS changes in the same way.
Although the values of both R and t are unknown for a current time slice in an
ongoing match, we can train a supervised learning model to predict the value of function
DETS for each time slice. Based on property 3, the model would be a good evaluator
for relative advantage between teams.

2.3 Time Slice Evaluation Model

We intend to design a supervised learning model which takes time slices as input and
outputs the value of function DETS . Due to the current limitation of research, we only
consider the factors in the part of current state in MGR analysis while designing models.
The structure of this Time Slice Evaluation (TSE) model is shown in Figure 3(a).
TSE model contains two parts of substructures. The individual (Ind) part calculates the
contribution of each character in the game separately, which corresponds to the indi-
vidual state in MGR analysis. Different characters in MOBA games have distinctive
design, strengths, and weaknesses. This part ignores any potential correlation between
characters but learns the unique features of each character. The global (Glo) part cal-
culates the contribution of all the characters in a match, corresponding to the global
state in MGR analysis. This part takes all the characters in a match as a whole and is
designed to learn the potential relationship of addition or restriction. To combine the
Ind and Glo, the outputs of the two parts are fed to lc layers of nc neurons activated by
relu function [15]. The output is calculated by one neuron activated by tanh function
to get a result in the range [−1, 1].
For a MOBA game which has ca playable characters in total, the Ind part consists
ca parts of subnets, each of which calculates a character’s contribution. For cm charac-
ters in a time slice, we use their corresponding subnets to calculate their contribution
individually, sum for each team and then subtract team B from team A to get the final
result. Usually, in MOBA games each character is not allowed to be used more than
once, so each subnet is calculated at most once for a time slice. But in practice, there
is still a problem for Ind part to train in batch. Different characters are used in different
matches, so the outputs need to be calculated with different sets of subnets. The data
path in the model varies for time slices from different matches.
With the structure defined in Figure 3(c), batch training is implemented. If each
character takes nc dimensions of data, the input of a time slice can be reshaped into
a matrix A ∈ Rcm ×nc . We create a distributer matrix D for each input, which only
6 L. Yu et al.

(a) TSE Model (b) Subnet

(c) Ind Part

Fig. 3: Model Structure

contains cm non-zero elements. D[i, j] = 1 means that the id of the i-th character in
this game is j, so the i-th row of A will be at the j-th row in matrix M = D · A and will
be fed to the j-th subnet. In vector G ∈ R1×ca , G[0, i] = 1 indicates character i is in
team A and G[0, i] = −1 indicates character i is in team B. Vector V ∈ Rca ×1 contains
the output of all ca subnets. We finally calculate the output by output = G · V .
The subnets of Ind part are feed-forward neural networks of the same scale. Each
subnet in Figure 3(b) takes in nc dimensions of input and outputs with a neuron acti-
vated by tanh. Each subnet has li hidden layers of ni neurons activated by relu and
applied dropout [19]. at rate rd
The Glo part is simply a multilayer feed-forward structure. It is like the subnet of
Ind part but in a much larger scale. It takes in a full time slice vector and outputs with
one neuron activated by tanh. The Glo part has lm fully connected hidden layers with
each nm neurons, activated by relu function and applied dropout at rate rd .
To get better distribution, we set the output of TSE model:

1 αt
y= = (3)
DETS (R, t) R
 MOBA-Slice: An Evaluation Framework of MOBA Games 7

And it needs to be transformed to correspond to the range of tanh function:

y − ymin
yscaled = −1 + 2 × ∈ [−1, 1] (4)
ymax − ymin
Let ŷ be the prediction from model. To transform it back. we can rescale ŷ by:

ŷ + 1
ŷrescaled = ymin + × (ymax − ymin ) (5)
2
and then prediction of t and R can be extracted as:

t̂ = |ŷrescaled |/α (6)

R̂ = sign(ŷrescaled ) (7)
As a regression problem, mean absolute error (MAE) and mean squared error (MSE)
are chosen as metrics. MAE is also the loss function. We can further calculate a rescaled
MAE by
ymax − ymin
MAE rescaled (ŷ, yscaled ) = MAE (ŷ, yscaled ) × (8)
2
Lemma 1.  
|ŷrescaled − y| ≥ α t̂ − t (9)

Proof.  
 αt̂ αt 
|ŷrescaled − y| =  − 
R̂ R
(   (10)
α t̂ − t when R̂ = R
=    
α t̂ + t ≥ α t̂ − t when R̂ = −R
 
where |R| = R̂ = 1 and t, t̂ ≥ 0
 

Theorem 1.
MAE rescaled (ŷ, yscaled ) ≥ αMAE (t̂, t) (11)

Proof.
MAE rescaled (ŷ, yscaled ) = MAE (ŷrescaled , y)
PN
|ŷrescaled − y|
= i=1
N (12)
PN  
t̂ − t
i=1 α
≥
N
= αMAE (t̂, t)

So MAE rescaled (ŷ, yscaled )/α proves to be the upper bound of MAE (t, t̂). It provides
a more intuitive way to evaluate the model’s effectiveness, as its value can be viewed in
units of time to reveal the mean error of prediction.
8 L. Yu et al.

3 Experiments

3.1 Apply MOBA-Slice to DotA2

We choose DotA2 as a typical MOBA game to apply MOBA-Slice. DotA2 generates a

replay file to record all the information in a match. An open source parser from Open-
Dota project6 can parse the replay file and generate interval messages every second
to record the state of each character. The following information contained in interval
messages is chosen to describe a time slice in current experiments.

– Character - hero id
– Attributes: life state, gold, experience, coordinate(x, y)
– Statistics:
• deaths, kills, last hit, denies, assists
• stacked creeps, stacked camps, killed towers, killed roshans
• placed observer, placed sentry, rune pickup, team-fight participation
– Items: 244 types

There are 114 characters which are called heroes in DotA2. In a match, each team
chl4 ooses five heroes without repetition. A hero may die at times and then respawn after
a period of delay. The life state attribute is used to record whether a hero is alive or dead.
Gold and experience are two essential attributes of a hero. Gold is primarily obtained
by killing enemy heroes, destroying enemy structures and killing creeps. Heroes can
use their gold to purchase items that provide special abilities. A hero’s experience level
begins at level 1 and grows as the game goes on. It is highly related to the level of a
hero’s ability. The position of a hero on the map is given in coordinate representation x
and y.
Many kinds of statistics are generated automatically by the game engine and the
replay parser to help analyze the game. Deaths, kills, last hit, denies and assists record
these historical events during the fights. Stacked creeps, camps and killed towers, roshans
record the hero’s fight history regarding these units. Invisible watchers, observer and
sentry, are helpful items that allow watching over areas and spy on enemies. Runes are
special boosters that spawn on the game map, which enhance heroes’ ability in various
ways. A team-fight is a fight provoked by several players with a considerable scale.
There are 244 types of items in DotA2 that can be purchased by a hero, according to
our statistics.
In the aspect of global state, lineup is represented by the id of 10 heroes. Position
and route are reflected in the coordinates of heroes. Since skill of heroes and status of
creeps and buildings are not recorded in interval messages, we do not involve these
fields of information in current experiments. Using lower-level parser such as manta7
and clarity8 to extract data from raw Protobuf structured replay is likely to address this
problem, but it significantly increases the complexity of data processing.
6
Replay parser from OpenDota project: https://github.com/odota/parser
7
Manta: https://github.com/dotabuff/manta
8
Clarity 2: https://github.com/skadistats/clarity
 MOBA-Slice: An Evaluation Framework of MOBA Games 9

3.2 Data Processing

The digital distribution platform developed by Valve Corporation, Steam, officially pro-
vides APIs9 for DotA2 game statistics. We use GetLeagueListing and GetMatchHistory
methods to get the list of all matches of professional game leagues10 . We then use Open-
Dota’s API11 to get detailed information of matches including the URL of its replay file
on Valve’s servers. After downloading and decompressing them, we send replay files to
OpenDota’s parser. With a massive cost of CPU time, we get downloaded and parsed
replay files of 105,915 matches of professional leagues, with a total size of over 3 TB.
We scan parsed replay files and create time slice vectors every 60 seconds of game
time. In a vector, each of ten heroes has 263 dimensions, including 1 for hero id, 5 for
attributes, 13 for statistics and 244 for items. Along with one dimension recording the
game time, each time slice vector has 2,631 dimensions. We also generate the value of
function DETS for each time slice, with the already known game result. In this process,
we notice that about 34 thousand replays are not correctly parsed due to game version
issues, file corruption or known limitation of the parser. After dropping these invalid
data, we get 2,802,329 time slices generated from 71,355 matches. The distribution of
match length is shown in Figure 4. The average length is about 40 minutes, with few
matches shorter than 10 minutes and very few matches longer than 100 minutes.

Fig. 4: Distribution of Match Length

9
Documentation of Steam APIs for DotA2: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/
wiki/WebAPI#Dota_2
10
Data processing took place in Oct. 2017
11
Documentation of OpenDota API for match data: https://docs.opendota.com/
#tag/matches
10 L. Yu et al.

3.3 First Training of TSE Model

Considering that the beginning part of a game might be erratic, we choose to only use
time slices from the last 50% time in each match in the first experiment. Experiments
with whole matches and other range of game time will be talked about in Section 3.6.
To simplify and get better distribution, we set r = e − 1 so α = 1. Adam optimizer [11]
is applied in the experiments.
To better know the optimized hyper-parameters of TSE model, we begin with train-
ing and testing partially. We train separately the Ind part with the input described above
and yscaled as its output. Each subnet of the Ind part takes in nc = 263 dimensions
representing one hero, including 1 for game time, 5 for attributes, 13 for statistics and
244 for items, which is similar to one-tenth of a time slice vector except that hero id
is replaced. Due to its structure, only ccma
of the Ind part is trained with every piece
of data, so the training process is slower than a fully connected model. For subnets,
li = 3, ni = 40, rd = 0.5 are proved to be the best, according to our experiments. We
use 90% of the dataset for training, 5% for validation and 5% for testing. This trained
Ind part shows an MAE of 0.1523 which indicates a prediction error of 11.15 minutes.
For the Glo part, we take the time slice vectors directly as input and yscaled as
output. nm = 400, lm = 4, rd = 0.5 are chosen as the hyper-parameters of the best
performance. On the same dataset as the Ind part, the Glo part shows a rescaled MAE
of 7.85 minutes.
For the remaining part of TSE model, nc = 4, lc = 3 are set. When we train the
whole TSE model, we regard it as a multi-output model to avoid training different parts
unequally. The loss is calculated by Equation 13. ŷInd , ŷGlo and ŷ are the outputs of
Ind part, Glo part, and the whole model.

loss = MAE (y, ŷ) + µ × MAE (y, ŷInd ) + ν × MAE (y, ŷGlo ) (13)

µ = 0.3, ν = 0.3 are proved to be an efficient set of parameters in this training. The
whole model is trained on the same dataset as previous at first. Then a 10-fold cross
validation at match level is applied to provide reliable result.

Table 1: Metrics of TSE Model

MAE MSE Rescaled MAE (minutes)
Blind prediction 0.5178 0.3683 37.91
Ind part 0.1523 0.0339 11.15
Glo part 0.1072 0.0290 7.85
TSE model 0.1050 0.0287 7.69
TSE model
0.10539 0.02794 7.716
(10-fold cross validation)

The result of experiments on partial and full TSE model is shown in Table 1. The
performance of TSE model indicates that it is an applicable model to fit function DETS .
Both the Ind part and the Glo part are valid compared with blind prediction. The Glo part
 MOBA-Slice: An Evaluation Framework of MOBA Games 11

has a better performance than the Ind part. That means only focusing on the individual
contribution separately would result in a significant loss of information. The correlation
between heroes plays an essential role in the matches. TSE model combines the two
parts and is better than either part, so the validity of both Ind part and Glo part is
proven. As TSE model is designed based on the split of individual and global state in
MGR analysis, its performance also supports MGR analysis.

3.4 Prediction on Continuous Time Slices

In the previous experiment, time slices are randomly shuffled. We can not discover how
TSE model works on continuous time slices from a match. This time we feed time slices
generated from a match to the trained TSE model in chronological order and observe
its performance on each match. Figure 5 shows the performance of TSE model on four
sample test matches. The horizontal axis t represents the remaining time before the end
of current match, which declines as the match goes on. The vertical line in the middle
splits the graphs into two parts. The right side of it is the last 50% time of the game,
which this TSE model is trained to fit.

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Fig. 5: Performance on Sample Matches

Focusing on the right side, we can see that TSE model successfully fits DETS in
the last half of matches. It works well on matches of arbitrary lengths no matter Radiant
12 L. Yu et al.

or Dire wins. The predicted value usually fluctuates around the real value. The missing
variables such as skills of heroes can be a major reason for such fluctuation.
The observations on whole matches above provide proof of the effectiveness of
MOBA-Slice on DotA2. As we can see from the figures, TSE model trained with data of
last half matches can evaluate time slices from the last half of new matches thoroughly.
This result shows that the functional relationship between the state of a time slice and
the game result described in DETS indeed exists, or TSE model would never be able to
work efficiently on new matches. With the figures and the properties of DETS explained
previously, we can see that TSE model can do more than just evaluation. It is also useful
enough to work as an online prediction model for the game result and the remaining
time.

3.5 Comparison with DotA Plus Assistant on Result Prediction

In the progress of our research, a monthly subscription service called DotA Plus12 was
unveiled in an update of DotA2 on March 12, 2018. As one part of DotA Plus service,
Plus Assistant provides a real-time win probability graph for every match, as shown
in Figure 6. It is praised as the ”Big Teacher” by Chinese players due to its accurate
prediction. Although Plus Assistant can not predict the remaining time of a match, its
prediction of game result can be used to evaluate the corresponding ability of MOBA-
Slice.

Fig. 6: Win Probability Graph of DotA Plus Assistant

To compare DotA Plus Assistant with MOBA-Slice, we have to choose matches

played after its release date, so we can not use the previous dataset. The tournament of
12
Homepage of DotA Plus: https://www.dota2.com/plus
 MOBA-Slice: An Evaluation Framework of MOBA Games 13

DotA2 Asian Championship13 was held from March 29th to April 7th. This tournament
has 105 matches totally, but 33 matches are unusable for network failure or newly intro-
duced heroes that are not included in the training data of our TSE Model. An upsetting
fact is that the winning probability data is not available from the replay parser, and is
suspected to be encrypted. So we manually download the valid 72 matches in DotA2
client and watch their replay to capture the winning probability graph. We discretize the
winning probability into 3 values: Radiant’s victory when above the middle line, Dire’s
when below it, and unknown when at it. We also feed these matches to the trained TSE
model, and discretize the output according to the sign of value as property 1 of DET S
described: positive for Radiant’s victory, negative for Dire’s, and zero for unknown.
As we have the prediction from both models, we sample the prediction and compare
with the real result to calculate the accuracy of a model at a specific game time percent.
For example, the prediction results of MOBA-Slice on each match at the time point of
10% of game time are used to calculate the accuracy of MOBA-Slice at 10% time point.
The unknown predictions are always counted as errors. We do this calculation every 10
percent of time for both models, and calculate the average for all time points. As the
result in Table 2, the average accuracy of MOBA-Slice is 3.7% higher than DotA Plus
Assistant at predicting the game result.

Table 2: Prediction Accuracy of MOBA-Slice and DotA Plus Assistant

Game time percent 10% 20% 30 % 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% Average
DotA Plus Assistant 0.4167 0.5139 0.5972 0.6111 0.6806 0.7500 0.7778 0.8472 0.9444 0.6821
MOBA-Slice 0.5694 0.5417 0.6111 0.7083 0.7083 0.7222 0.8056 0.8611 0.9444 0.7191

3.6 Towards Better Performance

For the first 50% time of the match in Figure 5, we can see that the error is much larger.
One possible reason is that this TSE model is not trained to fit the first half of games,
which contains different information from the last half. Changing the range of data
is a way to fix this problem. On the other hand, larger instability at the beginning of
matches also counts. The game situation may break our underlying assumption for the
monotonicity of relative advantage between teams. We can not avoid such instability as
the game situation may change at any time. But we can treat this as noise in the data.
As long as the instability in training data is relatively small, the models are effective.
We want to see the disparity of instability in different parts of matches, so we train
models with time slices from different intervals of game time. As TSE model takes a
longer time to train due to the structure of Ind part, we choose to work with merely its
Glo part.
As shown in Figure 7, experiments are carried out for every 10 percent of game
time. We train with time slices from 0%-10% of game time and test on 0%-10%, and
13
Homepage of DotA2 Asian Championship: http://www.dota2.com.cn/dac/2018/
index/?l=english
14 L. Yu et al.

Fig. 7: Experiments on Different Intervals

then repeat training and testing on 10%-20% and so on. The loss decreases as a match
goes on, indicating the decline of instability. In other words, it is much more difficult
to evaluate the beginning of a match than the ending. In interval 90%-100%, we can
predict the game result with an average error of about 1 minute, which shows a high
relevance of game situation and outcome. But we can not train models specific for an
interval of game time to evaluate ongoing matches, as we do not know the length of a
match until it ends. We further experiment on larger intervals to find out a proper range
of training data for predicting arbitrary time slices.
Results in Figure 8 are much better than in Figure 7, since relatively more training
data is fed to the model. The same trend that loss decreases as the game progresses
is seen in Figure 8. However, if observed from right to left, Figure 8 shows something
contrary to the common belief that training with more data results in better performance.
We find that as time interval gets larger, the model learns from more time slices but the
loss keeps growing. The instability of the beginning part seems so large as to worsen the
performance. It appears to be a trade-off problem to choose the proper range of training
data. The MAE in Figure 8 cannot be used to determine this as they are calculated on
different test sets. We suppose the best choice needs to be found in accordance with the
performance of MOBA-Slice in actual applications.

Fig. 8: Experiments on Larger Intervals

 MOBA-Slice: An Evaluation Framework of MOBA Games 15

4 Related Work
With the continuously growing number of players, MOBA games have been popular
with young people all over the world. As the design of MOBA games is complicated,
the large domain of knowledge contained in these games is of great research value. Re-
search related to MOBA games mainly consists three aspects: strategy analysis, result
prediction, and AI developing.
Strategy analysis is proved efficient at improving the performance of professional
players. Yang and Roberts [25] introduced a data-driven method to do post-competition
analysis and knowledge discovery, and evaluated on 3 games: DotA, Warcraft III and
Starcraft II. Hao et al. [10] studied player behavior and optimal team positions through
clustering. Bauckhage’s team [3] introduced a spatio-temporal clustering method to
partition game maps into meaningful areas. Cavadenti’s group [4] implemented a data
mining based method that discovers strategic patterns from historical behavioral traces
to help players improve their skills. Hanke and Chaimowicz [9] developed a recom-
mendation system for hero line-ups based on association rules. In most strategy related
researches, evaluation of a game situation or the game result is used as a part of the
algorithm to tell the effectiveness of a strategy or to optimize toward a bigger winning
rate. It is hard for such evaluation to fully utilize the multitudinous variables of MOBA
games. In the research of strategy analysis, we also met the problem of evaluation of
strategy. This ended up with the proposal of MOBA-Slice. MOBA-Slice is designed
to provide reliable quantitative evaluation of game situations. We now suggest using
MOBA-Slice as the evaluation algorithm in strategy analysis researches.
It is considered hard to predict the winners of a MOBA game, as the game situation
is always changeful. There are so many factors and features to choose from to build
a prediction model. Conley and Perry [7] implemented K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN)
algorithm to predict with merely hero lineup information. Wang [22] further used multi-
layer feedforward neural networks and added game length information into inputs, but
did not improve significantly. Almeida’s team [1] built classification models of Naive
Bayes, KNN, and J48 based on the composition of heroes and the duration of match.
Pu et al. [14] also worked towards identifying predictive information of winning team
with graph modeling and pattern extraction. Different from static prediction in previous
works, DotA Plus Assistant supports real-time prediction, but its algorithm remains
business secret. As a nice property of MOBA-Slice, it supports real-time prediction of
game results. And MOBA-Slice demonstrates better accuracy than DotA Plus Assistant.
Artificial intelligence of MOBA games interests many researchers. Many rule based
bots and machine learning algorithms have been developed. Andersen et al. [2] exam-
ined the suitability of online reinforcement learning in real-time strategy games with
Tank General as early as 2009. Synnaeve and Bessiere [21] used a semi-supervised
method with expectation-maximization algorithm to develop a Bayesian model for
opening prediction in RTS games. Kolwankar [12] employed genetic algorithms to ad-
just actions in evolutionary AI for MOBA. Silva and Chaimowicz [17] implemented a
two-layered architecture intelligent agent that handles both navigation and game me-
chanics for MOBA games. Wisniewski and Miewiadomski [24] developed state search
algorithms to provide an intelligent behavior of bots. Pratama et al. [13] designed AI
based on fuzzy logic with dynamic difficulty adjustment to avoid static AI mismatching
16 L. Yu et al.

player and AI’s difficulty level. AIIDE StarCraft AI competition [6] has been held ev-
ery year since 2010, with continuously rising popularity. Evaluation of situation is often
needed in artificial intelligence algorithms, which MOBA-Slice is designed to provide.
MOBA-Slice can work as the reward function in reinforcement learning models [20]
and the evaluation function in Monte Carlo planning models [5].

5 Conclusion

MOBA-Slice is a well-designed framework which evaluates relative advantage between

teams. It consists three parts: MGR analysis, discounted evaluation, and TSE model.
With MGR analysis we manage to describe the deciding factors of MOBA game result.
Discounted evaluation function DETS has several appealing properties one of which is
representing the relative advantage between teams. TSE model is designed to fit func-
tion DETS . Through applying MOBA-Slice to DotA2, we prove its effectiveness with
experiments on a large number of match replays and comparison with DotA Plus Assis-
tant. MOBA-Slice establishes a foundation for further MOBA related research which
requires evaluation methods, including AI developing and strategy analysis.
Here are several aspects listed for future work. The part of the future trend in MGR
analysis requires rating algorithm for players and teams. In the experiments, informa-
tion of heroes’ skills and the environment is not taken into consideration due to the
current limitation of data processing. More MOBA games can be chosen to apply and
test MOBA-Slice. Further, current TSE model is simply based on single time slice. Se-
quential prediction models can be designed with Recurrent Neural Network to take in
time slice sequences, which will provide more information about the game situation.

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