Esports Analytics Through Encounter Detection

Esports is computer games played in a competitive environment, and analytics in this domain is focused on player and team behavior. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are among the most played digital games in the world. In these games, teams of players fight against each other in enclosed arena environments, with a complex gameplay focused on tactical combat. Here we present a technique for segmenting matches into spatiotemporally defined components referred to as encounters, enabling performance analysis. We apply encounter-based analysis to match data from the popular esport game DOTA, and present win probability predictions based on encounters. Finally, metrics for evaluating team performance during match runtime are proposed.