The Hall of Fame gets its own page
The all-time rankings used to be a pop-up you cracked open on the join screen and closed a few seconds later. Now they live at /leaderboard — a real page, with a real URL, that you can bookmark, link and send to the pilot you just beat.
A modal is a dead end
When the leaderboards shipped, they rode in as an overlay: tap LEADERBOARD on the hangar, a card slid over the screen, you skimmed the boards, and you hit the × to get back to flying. It worked, but it was a dead end. You couldn't link it. You couldn't bookmark it. You couldn't fire it up on your phone to settle an argument without loading the whole game first. And a modal that darkens the hangar behind it always feels like something you're meant to dismiss, not somewhere you're meant to linger.
The Hall of Fame is the opposite of throwaway — it's the durable record of everyone who's ever flown here. It deserved a front door.
Its own front door
So it got one. /leaderboard is now a standalone page, served the same way /about and /live are — the same clean editorial chrome, set in the same geometric type, on the same deep cinematic backdrop. It's in the sitemap, it's precached by the service worker so it opens instantly offline, and it cross-links from the join screen, the About page and the Live page. It is, in every way that matters, a first-class page instead of a corner of the game UI.
The data hasn't changed — it still pulls the live standings from
/leaderboard.json, computed from the same lifetime ledger,
with bots still barred because they never carry a token. What changed is
that the rankings now have room to breathe. All seven boards — Top
Aces, Most Wins, Ship Killers, Siege Masters, Night Aces, Mission
Masters and Streak Masters — tile across the page in two columns on
a desktop and stack cleanly down a phone, each pilot's proudest career
medal riding beside their name.
Small change, right instinct
Mechanically this was a small move: lift the render out of the game bundle, drop it onto a page, wire a route, and delete the overlay it replaced. But it's the right instinct for anything that's meant to outlast a single session. Scoreboards belong in the game. Halls of fame belong on the wall — somewhere you can point at and say, look, that's me.