The Proficiency-Congruency Dilemma: Virtual Team Design and Performance in Multiplayer Online Games

Multiplayer online battle arena games provide an excellent opportunity to study team performance. When designing a team, players must negotiate a $\mathit{\text{proficiency-congruency}}\mathit{\text{dilemma}}$ between selecting roles that best match their experience and roles that best complement the existing roles on the team. We adopt a mixed-methods approach to explore how users negotiate this dilemma. Using data from $\mathit{\text{League}}\mathit{\text{of}}\mathit{\text{Legends}}$, we define a similarity space to operationalize team design constructs about role proficiency, generality, and congruency. We collect publicly available data from 3.36 million users to test the influence of these constructs on team performance. We also conduct focus groups with novice and elite players to understand how players’ team design practices vary with expertise. We find that player proficiency increases team performance more than team congruency. These findings have implications for players, designers, and theorists about how to recommend team designs that jointly prioritize individuals’ expertise and teams’ compatibility.