The leaderboards

They rank on kills over deaths, not on kills. A board of total kills is a board of who has played most, and nothing here makes a longer-serving player shoot harder has been in this game's design document since its first release. A board that crowns the longest-serving player is that rule broken in public. A rate is something one evening's play can top.

And a rate needs a floor. One kill and no deaths is a ratio of one, and it is the best ratio anybody will ever have. So it takes twenty-five kills in a mode to be ranked in it — about an evening — and everybody below that is still counted, still has a record, and is told the number.

A death nobody has had is counted as one, so that an unbeaten player has a ratio at all. It is what every scoreboard in every shooter does, and it costs them exactly the difference between forty and forty over one.

The Sprawl board ranks on getting out, because that is the mode. Kills there are on the Sprawl's own K/D board like anywhere else; the board with its name on it counts extractions, and a tie is broken on how much came out — two people who both got out eleven times are separated by the one who carried more, which is the decision the mode is actually about.

The game server builds them, out of one pass over its own account folder, and writes them down. This website reads that file. It does not read the accounts and sort them itself, and that is deliberate: the ranking rule would then exist twice, in two languages, and two implementations of a rule is one implementation and one bug waiting.

Which means these are rebuilt at most once a minute, and only when something has actually changed. A server nobody is playing on rebuilds nothing, and last night's copy sitting there is correct, because last night's copy is still true.