How Skill and Diversity Influence Team Performance

"In summary, it can be said that a team performs better if its members are only from one or two countries." [1] However, there is a catch to it. This was only the case for players of a specific skill level. Let's have a closer look at how team diversity in gaming impacts performance.

🌎 The Nationality of DotA 2 Players

There are an unlimited number of factors that influence the success of gaming and esports teams. One of them is diversity. More specifically, the nationality of the team's members. Some of the most dominant teams in esports history had players from one or two countries—like Astralis and Na'Vi in CS:GO. However, teams can also be successful if they are more diverse e.g., Team Liquid or Evil Geniuses.

Gaming is a near perfect playground for scientists to do research on this topic because "such teams are more diverse than conventional teams, with members representing not only different geographical locations, but also cultures and languages." [1]

To determine whether team performance goes up or down when teams are more or less diverse, the researchers analyzed 885,228 DotA 2 matches, played by 138,101 players. The data were pulled from Steam. The image below shows the top 10 countries where the players came from. In total, 233 countries were represented. The data, however, are from 2011.

🤝 Team Success, Experience and Friends

Although not the study's primary focus, the researcher "found that a winning team has on average a higher team experience score than a losing team." [1] This isn't really surprising to anyone, is it? What came as a little bit of a surprising is another finding of the study: the number of friends you play with affects performance.

"... the mean amount of friends for winning teams is significantly higher than for the losing teams." [1]

Why is it surprising? If you assume that playing with the people you know is an advantage over strangers, this result makes sense. However, if you and your buddies get thrown into a different queue against another pre-made team, this advantage should even out, right? Maybe it's because the data are from 2011 and separate queues weren't a thing back then?

👥 Team Success, Diversity, and Skill—What's the Relationship?

"... a team performs better if its members are only from one or two countries. This is especially true for matches where the players are not so advanced yet, i.e., matches with [low] skill level..." [1]

To be more precise, "teams with members from one or two different countries... have a win rate of 51.6%." [1] Conversely, the win rate of teams with members from three or more different countries was found to be 49.3%. But what about higher-ranked players?

"... our results clearly imply that if the players become more advanced, it is not crucial how a team is composed in terms of nationality – its performance does no depend on it." [1]

Thanks for reading, everyone. Read you next Sunday,

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Pobiedina et al., 2013