Tweeting your Destiny: Profiling Users in the Twitter Landscape around an Online Game

Social media has become a major communication channel for communities centered around video games. Consequently, social media offers a rich data source to study online communities and the discussions evolving around games. Towards this end, we explore a large-scale dataset consisting of over 1 million tweets related to the online multiplayer shooter Destiny and spanning a time period of about 14 months using unsupervised clustering and topic modelling. Furthermore, we correlate Twitter activity of over 3,000 players with their playtime. Our results contribute to the understanding of online player communities by identifying distinct player groups with respect to their Twitter characteristics, describing subgroups within the Destiny community, and uncovering broad topics of community interest.Comment: Accepted at IEEE Conference on Games 201

How do Software Professionals Use Local Informal Meetups?

This report presents the findings of the world’s first study of informal technology meetups. Local meetings organised by and for technology professionals have grown rapidly in size, reach and scope in recent years. Despite this, however, little is known about how participating in such communities impacts local professionals

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 es, teams of players fight against each other in enclosed arena environs, with a complex gameplay focused on tactical combat. Here we present a technique for segmenting matches into spatio‐temporally 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

Win Prediction in Esports: Mixed-Rank Match Prediction in Multi-player Online Battle Arena Games

Esports has emerged as a popular genre for players as well as spectators, supporting a global entertainment industry. Esports analytics has evolved to address the requirement for data-driven feedback, and is focused on cyber-athlete evaluation, strategy and prediction. Towards the latter, previous work has used match data from a variety of player ranks from hobbyist to professional players. However, professional players have been shown to behave differently than lower ranked players. Given the comparatively limited supply of professional data, a key question is thus whether mixed-rank match datasets can be used to create data-driven models which predict winners in professional matches and provide a simple in-game statistic for viewers and broadcasters. Here we show that, although there is a slightly reduced accuracy, mixed-rank datasets can be used to predict the outcome of professional matches, with suitably optimized configurations

Exploration and Skill Acquisition in a Major Online Game

Using data from a major commercial online game, Destiny, we track the development of player skill across time. From over 20,000 player record we identify 3475 players who have played on 50 or more days. Our focus is on how variability in elements of play affect subsequent skill development. After validating the persistent influence of differences in initial performance between players, we test how practice spacing, social play, play mode variability and a direct measure of game-world exploration affect learning rate. These latter two factors do not affect learning rate. Players who space their practice more learn faster, in line with our expectations, whereas players who coordinate more with other players learn slower, which contradicts our initial hypothesis. We conclude that not all forms of practice variety expedite skill acquisition. Online game telemetry is a rich domain for exploring theories of optimal skill acquisition

Beyond the Meta: Leveraging Game Design Parameters for Patch-Agnostic Esport Analytics

Esport games comprise a sizeable fraction of the global games market, and is the fastest growing segment in games. This has given rise to the domain of esports analytics, which uses telemetry data from games to inform players, coaches, broadcasters and other stakeholders. Compared to traditional sports, esport titles change rapidly, in terms of mechanics as well as rules. Due to these frequent changes to the parameters of the game, esport analytics models can have a short life-spam, a problem which is largely ignored within the literature. This paper extracts information from game design (i.e. patch notes) and utilises clustering techniques to propose a new form of character representation. As a case study, a neural network model is trained to predict the number of kills in a Dota 2 match utilising this novel character representation technique. The performance of this model is then evaluated against two distinct baselines, including conventional techniques. Not only did the model significantly outperform the baselines in terms of accuracy (85% AUC), but the model also maintains the accuracy in two newer iterations of the game that introduced one new character and a brand new character type. These changes introduced to the design of the game would typically break conventional techniques that are commonly used within the literature. Therefore, the proposed methodology for representing characters can increase the life-spam of machine learning models as well as contribute to a higher performance when compared to traditional techniques typically employed within the literature

Do Influencers Influence? -- Analyzing Players' Activity in an Online Multiplayer Game

In social and online media, influencers have traditionally been understood as highly visible individuals. Recent outcomes suggest that people are likely to mimic influencers' behavior, which can be exploited, for instance, in marketing strategies. Also in the Games User Research field, the interest in studying player social networks has emerged due to the heavy reliance on online influencers in marketing campaigns for games, as well as in keeping players engaged. Despite the inherent value of those individuals, it is still difficult to identify influencers, as the definition of influencers is a debated topic. Thus, how can we identify influencers, and are they indeed the individuals impacting others' behavior? In this work, we focus on influence in retention to verify whether central players impacted others' permanence in the game. We identified the central players in the social network built from the competitive player-vs-player (PvP) multiplayer (Crucible) matches in the online shooter Destiny. Then, we computed influence scores for each player evaluating the increase in similarity over time between two connected individuals. In this paper, we were able to show the first indications that the traditional metrics for influencers do not necessarily apply for games. On the contrary, we found that the group of central players was distinct from the group of influential players, defined as the individuals with the highest influence scores. Then, we provide an analysis of the two groups.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 202