Character Balance in MOBA Games

As live streaming of video games has become easier, electronic sports have grown quickly and they are still increasing as tournaments grow in viewers and prizes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the theory Metagame Bounds by applying it to League of Legends and Dota 2, to see if it is a valid way of looking at character balance in the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game genre. The main mode of both games consist of matches played on a map where a team of five players is up against another team of five players. Characters in the games generally have four abilities and a number of attributes, making them complex to compare without context. We gathered character data from websites and entered the data into a file that we used with the Metagame Bounds application. We compared the graphs that the data yielded with how often a character wins and how often it is played. To examine whether the characters were balanced we also played the games and analysed the characters in depth. All statistical data gathered was retrieved over the span of a few hours on the 21st of April 2015 from the websites Champion.gg for League of Legends and Dotabuff for Dota 2. Sirlin’s (2001) definition of multiplayer game balance is “A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably large number of options available to the player are viable – especially, but not limited to, during high-level play by expert players.” and with the data we see that these games are balanced in terms of characters according to that definition. Overall we believe that Metagame Bounds is a valid way of looking at balance within the genre, but the data is not completely reliable on its own and should be compared with other statistics