Today we’re going to look at the relationship between the success rates of different heroes based on the length of the game. Some heroes perform distinctly better in games that end early, and others prefer games that drag on, and while most of the placements aren’t terribly surprising, it’s still something worth establishing.

My method here is pretty straightforward. I took the +35k game Very High sample that I’ve been recently, and created a list of game durations. As it turned out, 1/3 of games were shorter than 33:20, and 1/3 of games were longer than 41:46, so I used those as my break points to define short, medium, and long games (the overall average was 37:50). I found each heroes win rate in all 3 types of games, and sorted them by how skewed their win rates were towards either end of the spectrum. To keep things simple, I’ll just be expressing this skew in the tables by the difference in win rate between the short and long games or vice versa. So let’s kick things off with the top 15 heroes that prefer short games and the top 15 that prefer long games.

The biggest surprises here for me were Nightstalker and Axe both doing significantly better in longer games. You might also notice that the Long list is very carry oriented while the short list is more support oriented. Part of this is likely that every support you have on a team is a position that isn’t filled by a carry and will automatically bias your team strategy towards quicker games. What this means is that your core farmers likely exert the stronger pull on the idea team timing, so if you have both a Chen and Anti-Mage on a team, Anti-Mage’s duration preference probably trumps Chen’s.

So given this tendency, I thought it’d be helpful to point out the supports that skew the most towards late wins and the carries that skew the most towards early wins.

One word of warning I feel I should add here is that while it can make sense to pair a bunch of early oriented heroes together (say, Power Ranger’s lineup with Chaos Knight and Weaver as their carries with Treant as a support), the reverse doesn’t necessarily hold. If you’re running a late-game oriented lineup you might need some strong early heroes just to make sure that you actually make it to the late game. This is particularly true when pubbing, and to illustrate why that is, let’s look at the heroes with the highest observed win rate in Very High games.

You can see pretty clearly that this list pretty heavily biased towards early game heroes (though the big exception in Spectre is pretty noteworthy). Being able to put the game away early is a huge advantage in a disorganized pub environment, so if you’re trying to bump up your win rate make it a point to pick heroes that you’re capable of making a sub-20m impact with.

For those of you who want to see the entire list here’s the table with all the data (Click to enlarge)

As well as the entire dataset for both Very High and Normal in Google Drive.

Finally, have the overall match duration for every hero in both Very High and Normal

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