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Competitive online games use rating systems to match players with similar skills to ensure a satisfying experience for players. In this paper, we focus on the importance of addressing different aspects of playing behavior when modeling players for creating match-ups. To this end, we engineer several behavioral features from a dataset of over 75,000 battle royale matches and create player models based on the retrieved features. We then use the created models to predict ranks for different groups of players in the data. The predicted ranks are compared to those of three popular rating systems. Our results show the superiority of simple behavioral models over mainstream rating systems. Some behavioral features provided accurate predictions for all groups of players while others proved useful for certain groups of players. The results of this study highlight the necessity of considering different aspects of the player's behavior such as goals, strategy, and expertise when making assignments.

One of the main goals of online competitive games is increasing player engagement by ensuring fair matches. These games use rating systems for creating balanced match-ups. Rating systems leverage statistical estimation to rate players' skills and use skill ratings to predict rank before matching players. Skill ratings of individual players can be aggregated to compute the skill level of a team. While research often aims to improve the accuracy of skill estimation and fairness of match-ups, less attention has been given to how the skill level of a team is calculated from the skill level of its members. In this paper, we propose two new aggregation methods and compare them with a standard approach extensively used in the research literature. We present an exhaustive analysis of the impact of these methods on the predictive performance of rating systems. We perform our experiments using three popular rating systems, Elo, Glicko, and TrueSkill, on three real-world datasets including over 100,000 battle royale and head-to-head matches. Our evaluations show the superiority of the MAX method over the other two methods in the majority of the tested cases, implying that the overall performance of a team is best determined by the performance of its most skilled member. The results of this study highlight the necessity of devising more elaborated methods for calculating a team's performance-methods covering different aspects of players' behavior such as skills, strategy, or goals.