I (finally) sent in my request for a registration code. While reading through it again, it dawned on me that some of you may have concerns about my take on SK running his own BP list, and the future of the EGRL. My "essay" addressed that aspect so, here's an open letter on my request:
The Official EGRL Request For Registration:
Originally this list was begun to share the information I had gathered while climbing the ranks. NG only lists the top 50 for most things, and even less on others, so it was impossible to tell how much you needed to earn to climb from 60 to 59, or 200 to 199, unless you knew who the person was at the ranking above you. Once you knew who was above you, you could then pull up their profile and determine the differential. When begun, there were merely 250 Elite Guards, all of whom had to be “found” the hard way, which entailed pulling up profiles to see if they should be added to the list or not. As time went on, I expanded that listing to include Police Captains, and later Police Lieutenants, so that when I did find someone, I didn’t have to worry about their later climbing into the Elite Guard ranks without my knowing of it and having to hope I could find their profile again after they had done so. Your Data Miner invention is an amazing resource that has revolutionized all of the lists, and I want to continue to be able to use it.
At start up, I merely listed those ranking 51 and lower, as they were the people unable to readily determine who was above them. One I made it into the top 50, I added that grouping to the listing. It is my list after all, and there was no way I was going through all that effort and not be on the end result. Over the next few months, the list underwent a series of evolutions finally arriving at the basic format now seen on the EGRL website. Tracking of those who were inactive, and using italics for them, rank-up announcements, BP rates, et al, were all begun in the original thread and have carried over to the incarnation now at the site.
By October 2003, the amount of time involved in making the list had grown so much, and my real life requirements so great, that I had to abandon the list. LockClock filled the void during my hiatus, maintaining some, but not all, of the list. When he had to quit updating, jonthomson did one and then gladly handed the reins back to me in March 2004. An extraordinary increase in the number of Elite Guards had occurred in the interim, which made it impossible to post the list in thread without having to find some way to break the 4 post per half hour limit. While scrolling through the old updates, I happened upon a couple of LockClock’s posts, where he had done the actual list on a webpage and simply provided a link to it in thread. The idea of the EGRL website was born at that moment.
Creating the site, and adapting the spreadsheet to the new formatting requirements it posed, was an ordeal I’d rather not experience again. As when first begun, the list has continued to evolve, most of it behind the scenes, and has taken an incredible number of hours to maintain. Greg retired from maintaining the Top 50 Blammer and Savior lists, and those have migrated to being maintained at the site as well. Despite the fact that you are now doing updates of BP rankings, I still see a need for the EGRL to exist. I’m obviously feign to simply abandon something that has taken so much of my time and effort. The site has become a well known and established resource for those climbing the ranks and innovations I’ve added at the site, such as providing links to profiles, have been adopted by others maintaining lists including yourself. My list provides a number of features yours does not, as yours provides assets that mine does not, and I have the added bonus of no concerns with respect to bandwidth usage or storage space for archival purposes, particularly since I am only listing the Elite Guards. The two running in parallel should more than adequately fulfill any needs of the stat conscious.
Comparisons between our two versions of the BP listings, and your XP list versus ramagi’s, are obviously going to occur. Providing none of us get too wrapped up in “my list” nonsense, I see nothing but good coming from those contrasts. They provide the opportunity for others to evaluate what they want from a list and, by expressing that, will let us know what adaptations we should make. A list based upon rate gain, or a top 50 based upon percentage, are the ideas of other users that I have implemented. Between us, we may have tapped out everything that can legitimately be done with a BP ranking, but there could be some other improvements out there that the assessments of the two lists will present.
Oh, I almost forgot: gimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimmegimme.