Let me elaborate a little more on this to clarify:
the average match length will scale up depending on how you pull the data
You cant just say "dont include 10 minute surrenders" in a data set (well you can but its not going to do what you want it to do). You have to choose a minimum acceptable match length.
You could search by flag=was surrendered, but thats generally a bad idea because very close/good/long games can still end in surrender, often right before the titan dies or after a huge fight is lost. Culling out surrenders does generally increase the average match length, but I think it also culls out data that is important to keep.
So instead you have to average all matches over 10m, or all matches over 15m, etc
With that logic - we have internally decided that matches that end before 15m for any reasons are bad matches. You could potentially argue that even 20m is still a pretty rough match now in 9.5 - but I think many reasonable surrenders could have happened between 15 to 20m in 9.4, so as you can see this has a lot of room for interpretation.
But whenever we run "all matches" we tend to include all matches that last 10m or longer, only culling out "early surrenders" which means someone DC'd - This is what stat was provided in the patch notes
so if we run average of all matches ever (including DCs and early surrenders)
- Average Conquest Match Length = 23.88m in 9.4 and 26.57m in 9.5
Running only 10m + (culling only early matches) (stat in patch notes)
- Average Conquest Match Length = 26.30m in 9.4 to 29.43m in 9.5 (also includes extra days of data since patch notes was written)
Running average of all matches 15m+ (all "good" matches)
- Average Conquest Match Length = 29.03m in 9.4 and 31.53m in 9.5
Running average of all matches 20m+ (all "arguably better matches")
- Average Conquest Match Length = 30.95m in 9.4 and 33.43m in 9.5
As you can see, there is essentially a gradual amount of bad matches/surrenders, so the more you cut, the more the average match length goes up, but at a certain point (id argue 15 to 20m) you start cutting out too many matches from the data set. Those 15m to 20m matches are important to consider to keep track of how many matches are still being snowballed or surrendered at an early time, but not insanely early.
You could look at "no surrenders" in all of these time frames, and it would increase the average match length - running "no surrenders only and no matches under 20m" you get the average match length of 34.30m which is longer, but why would it be better to exclude surrenders in that? if a match is 30m long and then gets surrendered after a deicide why should we cut that?
to break 40m average in the data i have to exclude all matches under 35m and exclude all surrenders, which i dont think is a very accurate way to portray the data, obviously we have a lot of matches happening that are ending in the 20-30m range.
All data is biased, it all depends on specifically how you query the raw data and how you choose to present it. Its never our intention to mislead players, just trying to show how much this changed.
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