It’s nice to be able to see the top 10 and the 10 that you’re in, but why not let us see all standings for an event?
I would guess it has to do with saving network data since this is a mobile game after all. Rankings and scores are changing constantly, so as you scroll up/down, the client would have to keep fetching data.
Server load probably: much cheaper to send 10 name/score values than 500.
That’s understandable, I wish there was at least a possibility to display the whole ranking after the event is ended.
If you have a sane architecture; no. Slicing that list on a per-request basis is infinitely more expensive than being able to push out a cached version of the same list to all users (and invalidate that cached response every x seconds).
The real reason is probably mobile bandwidth. (In which case I’d say that’s still no reason to not push full updates to the desktop client…)
Server load and bandwidth are bad excuses. Like mentioned, if done right it shouldn’t tax the servers any more than they already are. As for bandwidth, the data would be so small, just kB in size, that I doubt it would matter much to people.