The Game Theory of Dota 2
In 2011 Valve released Dota2, a new online video game with it’s tournament dubbed The International. Players from all over the world game to Cologne, Germany to play for the grand prize of one million US dollars in the largest e-sport event of all time. This past July the fourth rendition of the International was played out in Seattle’s Key Arena with a 12,000 person live audience and a 10 Million dollar prize pool, five of which went to the first place team. Dota 2 is a game of strategy, skill, and most importantly outthinking your opponent. In Dota, each team consists of five heroes and at the center of each base is a building called the Ancient. Destroying the other teams ancient is how a team win in Dota. These 5 heroes are picked from a pool over 100 heroes in the game. Each game begins with a draft to decide each teams heroes. Captains alternate banning heroes they think the other team wants, and picking the heroes they want. This back and forth between captains includes a massive amount of game theory to master.
The metagame is what the tendencies of pro players to pick and ban heroes is described as. There are multitudes of factors that captains have to take into consideration in their draft. Some of the factors discussed in “ DotA 2: Understanding Captain’s Mode Draft in Competitive Games” There are some heroes that are just generally better than others, some heroes which are really good if the other team doesn’t have other certain heroes, there are heroes that specific players on the other team might be really good at, and tons of other things. There is also a component of when to reveal your strategy in drafting. For instance the first two heroes banned by each teams are generally “ overpowered” heroes (heroes that are well known to serious players for being unquestionably too strong). If a team bans an unorthodox hero in the first two, it might be an indication that they’re going to pick a hero who is very weak against the abnormal hero they banned and as such you might chose to ban that hero.
In one really famous example of applied game theory a team called Zenith was playing the 2012 International Champions Invictus Gaming. No one thought Zenith could win, little did they know that Zenith’s use of game theory would allow them to prevail. They banned no heroes against Invictus Gaming, who proceeded to pick heroes that didn’t have good synergy because they were too excited at the notion of getting the exact strategy that they wanted. This lead them to have a weaker team than Zenith who ended up winning through out-predicting their opponents. This is an extreme case of Drafter’s understanding game theory and applying it to win. The combination of all the factors that go into a draft really challenges a captain to craft a well thought out strategy by not only considering his own moves, but also the moves of the other team. Correctly doing this can result in winning millions of dollars if done at the highest level, but never ceases to cause the simple satisfaction of outthinking an opponent in a game of skill.
P.S. For anyone interested in learning more about Dota2’s competitive scene, especially The International Tournament checked out the documentary “ Free to Play” by Valve which tells the story of the first International. d
Link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZYMI1zB9s