Social Network Analysis of High-Level Players in Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Game

Recently, multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games have become one of the most popular video game genres. They are also known as Defense of the Ancients (DotA)-like games. As an online-based matching game, it is interesting to analyze players’ social structure. In League of Legends (LOL), the most popular MOBA game, players form a team and fight against an enemy together. In the game, they build communities like other conventional social network services (SNSs). In this paper, we analyze the social network of LOL, constructed from team/player data extracted with an official application programming interface (API). In particular, the ranks of players are considered in the analysis. The experimental results show the important features in the social structure of LOL that would be useful for applications in player modeling and match making.