Cybersport research

Cybersport is a vital and debatable topic for the scientific society. For example, it is still unclear whether eSports can be called as a type of traditional sports or not. Even though such questions are still unanswerable, on the 28th of April Ksenia Konstantinova, Vsevolod Suschevskiy, and Ekaterina Marchenko told the audience about several important for the eSports themes during the regular research group seminar: broadcasts of the major tournaments and transfers between cybersport teams.

Ksenia Konstantinova, the participant of the research group, presented her research about the audience behaviour in chats of the streaming service Twitch.tv. The main characteristic of such data is its size and frequency: very often messages are spammed in the chat, and they can consist only of one symbol or emoji. With the help of text analysis methods (LDA), Ksenia showed that even in a fast message flow which does not have any ‘plot’ or sense, several topics could be detected. Moreover, these topics diverse according to messages’  types.

Than, Vsevolod Suschevskiy and Ekaterina Marchenko, second-year students, told about the structure of the transfer network between eSports teams on the case of Dota 2. With the help of SNA methods (ERGM, REM), main factors influencing the probability of transferring were detected. For example, they include homogeneity of the region (in which teams qualify to the major tournament), and (non)participation in the previous such tournament. Further, students are going to add such data as mediametrics (mentionability of players in social media), and individual points of the players. 
All presented research are held within the research group, and they are closely connected with many aspects of group activity. 

 It was an exciting seminar. Ekaterina and Vsevolod told about transfers in cybersport in the case of Dota 2. Even though they haven’t finished their work yet, they do have some interesting results. In particular, transfers are more frequent to be done between teams of one region, while in China there are whole coalitions of clubs in which players swap on the regular basis. 

Shelopugin Andrey Alexandrovich
2nd year student of MA Big Data Analysis for Business, Economy, and Society