> FWIW the developer of the game has also tried to fix this over the years, devising ways to get more resources to the 4th and 5th players. For example, there is a system similar to UBI where all members of the team benefit equally from "bounty runes". But till date, the bots have achieved a level of egalitarianism yet to be matched by human players.

this kinda makes sense. I'm more of a cs player, so hopefully my observations aren't totally off base. generally, a group of five humans will have some sense of who their best player is, who their worst player is, and who's good at specific roles. for instance, you might deliberately send your worst player into a bombsite first to gain info about the opponent's defense (and save your best player to react to that info). or you might send the person who's best at "entry fragging".

an egalitarian playstyle doesn't make sense when you have human players with different capabilities. you want to play to each person's strengths. if you have an algorithm controlling five heroes (or five instances of the same algorithm, idk how it works), there's no "best player" to send more resources to or dedicate to a specific role. I don't know enough about moba to say whether this is even an advantage.

none of this stuff is particularly interesting in counterstrike. a circa 1999 aimbot with a good ping will beat any human player.

Replace player by character and you're basically there. Typical about MOBA's (and now also in e.g. Valorant these days) is that each character you choose comes with a certain 'kit' of skills and stats that give it different strength and weaknesses. A character might have powerful spells early on, others are very weak early but dominate towards the end because scale really well with extra resoures. The former will typically act in a more sacrificial role to enable the latter. The OpenAI favored a strategy where you snowball an early advantage into an early to midgame win, before the 'carry' characters start to dominate. That in itself is not new though, it just executed it in a weird but consistent way. One of the weird ways was indeed that 'egalitarian' way of having the 'support' characters be more greedy, enabling them to have a higher impact on the early/mid game timing, when the deathball starts rolling.