Seems like a such a trivially better decision
In fact, it was always a bit suspicious that Open AI chose to work on a different game, which may or may not be as hard. Having multiple groups working on the same problem makes it easier to understand the progress made.
Dota 2 is tactical, so having perfect micro is enough to win at least simple matches. Starcraft 2 is a different story.
Tencent just owns a majority stake in Riot they didnt develop LoL and have very little to do with the actual game more likely they went with SC2 because it’s easier to integrate with as it has a bot API and it looks less like they are copying OpenAI and making another MOBA AI.
SC2 and DOTA/LoL are also fundamentally different games with SC2 not being cooperative and presenting a different set of problems and solutions than MOBAs.
> In February 2011, Tencent paid $400 million for a 93 percent stake in Riot Games.[2][8] Tencent bought the remaining 7 percent in December 16, 2015; the price was not disclosed.
I don't know about you, but having 100% of the shares seems like a quite a bit more than "significant interest" in the company. Some would say that this "significant interest" qualifies as ownership :)
From the article:
> Two years later, after watching the game take off in the U.S., Tencent raised its stake to 94% at a price valuing Riot at about $400 million. The remainder was held by the founders and employees, who wanted to keep at least some equity.
> That deal would prove pivotal in what was to come. To persuade Messrs. Beck and Merrill to sell most of the equity, Tencent’s international chief David Wallerstein negotiated an agreement that ensured Riot could operate almost like a separate company. Tencent took two seats on Riot’s five-member board, while Riot’s founders took two others. The fifth seat was empty, a structure which remains in place.
So yes, technically Tencent owns Riot, but they don't control Riot. I guess from a semantic viewpoint I was incorrect in that they "own" League of Legends, but as far as Riot is concerned Tencent doesn't have any control over its development, including building an API to support AI/ML research.
Also because Starcraft has three races, i. e. 9 matchups. But if you pick one race for your AI, you only have three matchups to worry about. LoL on the other hand has about 500 champions (give or take), whose strengths and weaknesses are vastly dependent on the current patch. LoL is less about skill or strategy, and more about picking the champion of the week.
Starcraft works because they have such a small number of matchups that balancing them is possible. Certainly not easy, and players keep figuring out ways to evolve the meta game. Maybe an AI could even find interesting new strategies. But LoL has so many matchups that their balancing team has an absolutely impossible task of trying to catch up. It's so complex that they can't just think about in theory, but they have to look at win-rate statistics, over different skill ranges. At this point it's more a problem of data science. And the number of champions keeps growing, because that's how they make money.
LoL has 141 champions. Still significantly higher than Dota's 116.
A common note I hear when people discuss open AI playing dota is that it uses pre-made matchups, which reduces the number of matchups considerably.
Would it be that difficult to have the AI play the picking stage? Compared to the complexity of the decisions you have to make during the game, the picks are straightforward - especially if you have performance data on matchups.
The number of practice games the AI would have to play to learn to handle all the heroes goes up drastically, but that's only a matter of time.
Also, it only played mirror matches. If it had to play any hero against any hero, that's 3.393109e+190 possible matchups.
(Plus two shorter / more recent status updates)
One theory I heard was that the pre-made matchups at TI were designed to prevent the human players from getting out-drafted. (The hero pool was pretty limited, which could result in a different meta from what the human players were used to.) They wanted to make the matches purely a test of in-game skill, not about the metagame. As far as I know though, the OpenAI team hasn't explicitly confirmed that.
> Because Starcraft is 1v1 and LoL is 5v5
Starcraft can also be played 5v5
> Also because Starcraft has three races, i. e. 9 matchups
But each race has 20 different units. The units are more
similar to LOL champions than the races. There are also a
tonne of different buildings and upgrades to choose from.
LOL is very similar to DOTA and given that OpenAI already
beat *human* players in DOTA, LOL is not that farfetched. The
current work, although impressive, still cannot beat *human*
players in SC2. The complexity of designing AI for a game
depends heavily on the branching factor of decision in the
game. SC2 has a much higher branching factor than LOL or any
other games played by n00bs.