Long long ago, way before PGI added any leaderboards to the game, the Jarl's List consisted of me manually entering data from Faction Play screenshots into Google Sheets. This was back when I didn't really know how to use spreadsheets. But we had
Scuro The Black-Shot, and he was an industrious and knowledgeable lad. He cast his wizardry of arrayformula() and sort() and filter() and match() and ... after some time we basically had a Faction Play leaderboard. We scrounged screenshots from all the land to fuel our dataset and added features as we went. Eventually, we began to open up to sharing the fruits of our efforts with other units, and before long we had a half-dozen people from various units in the FRR contributing to entering screenshots into our database. If you played CW with the FRR back when we were doing this, you probably got added to this project. Scuro set up a web page that could display the googlesheet output publicly, and bam! We basically had a working public leaderboard for all CW FRR players!
And then PGI added leaderboards to the game and rendered everything we did completely obsolete.
But I had a new toy! Pineapple Salad figured out how to scrape PGI's
Quickplay Leaderboard, outputting to CSV. I could take that data and build a spreadsheet that could combine the disparate seasons into one master lookup table. All you had to do was enter a pilot's name and it would calculate his overall stats for you. You could even paste in lists of team members from the MRBC website. The QP Leaderboard Tool was born!
Of course, the QP Leaderboard Tool was built entirely in Google Sheets, because I do everything in Google Sheets. But after six or seven seasons worth of data, Sheets started running into... well, problems. I spent countless hours tweaking and adding to my mesmerizing creation instead of playing the game itself, I even discovered a bodge to surpass Google Sheets' 2-billion cell limit that was holding me back. But it was clear that I needed to upgrade to a proper database, and lookups were running slower and slower as I fed more seasons into the monster.
A *proper* database though... I would have to learn how make an SQL thingamajig, and I'm pretty sure I'd have to learn how to code in PHP, and I'm not programmer.
But Scuro was.
And fancy that, Scuro wanted an excuse to learn MySQL anyways. So he got started on it. I wanted to help of course, but I never had the time to really dig into learning this SQL and PHP jazz, so I kinda just... let Scuro do his thing. All the while moaning that I wanted to help, but never actually getting involved aside from contributing a few maths formulas. We decided to call the new site "The Jarl's List" again, as an homage to the Isengrim's first leaderboard project. After proving stable and functioning properly, it's been a fixture for a few months now.
Of course, I kept getting ideas for things to add/fix but never getting involved myself. This week though, I finally got my hands dirty for the first time. I had to basically learn PHP and MySQL on the fly to add the new features. Even then, I spent hours mostly bumbling around with syntax errors and "WHY THE #@&%$ ISN'T THIS WORKING"
hint: probably because semicolon Usually Scuro stepped in and fixed the problems, or did sections for me. Even more daunting was just the sheer amount of code I had to internalize just to understand everything that Scuro had built, how it all fit together and interacted. Daunting of course because I'm a complete noob, not because he writes bad code or anything. I thought I'd be able to just copy paste a few elements here and there, maybe call a function or define a new variable, and boom new feature added. NOPE!
Chuck Testa Had to really wrap my mind around things and sorta write new routines and modify old ones.
In the end, I didn't do much. Scuro did half or more of the work I set out. Sometimes when I was asleep. =3
But I did get a much better appreciation for the amount of time and effort that he put into building this website, even if it's just a learning project for him.
So I ask that if you use this resource, please thank Scurro for his substantial time and effort! =D
(also would be kinda nice if you use it for constructive purposes, and not shaming other players with poor stats. There's kind of a reason I never made my old Google Sheet version public - was afraid of people abusing it. But hey, no point in keeping this stuff internal anymore if not many people will use it. And anybody who uses it for eeeeviiiilll is only reflecting poorly upon themselves, so wheeeeee!)