A group of Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred players hijacked the top leaderboard ranks not for glory, but to promote their expertise at making the strongest character builds

As fun as it is to see bigger damage numbers than you probably should in action RPGs, Blizzard has been able to keep players from completely trivializing Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's satisfying character progression, and—most surprisingly—its work-in-progress competitive leaderboards system.

Lord of Hatred has a mode called The Tower where you slay monsters to fill a progress bar as fast as you can. There are 150 levels of difficulty so players can measure how powerful their characters are compared to others on its leaderboards.

I'm not usually concerned with competitive integrity when it comes to games like Diablo, but I'm always fascinated by the people who do. Blizzard's swift patches have made the leaderboards a useful spot to check what builds and which players are crushing the game.

When you look at the leaderboards, you'll see a lot of names of players you probably won't recognize, save for a few notable streamers. Over the weekend, however, there were several top-ranked players on the NA and EU leaderboards sharing the same name: "INFbuilds".

It wasn't the world's most skilled Diablo player hopping between classes to hit rank 1 on each of their individual leaderboards, it was actually a group of players trying to prove that they know what they're doing when it comes to buildcrafting. The "INFbuilds" names refer to InfinityBuilds, a Diablo 4 build guides website helmed by Mekuna, a streamer and player who has been in the spotlight before.

The group's goal isn't to share the glory of being the best of the best, but to help more casual Diablo 4 players understand how to make their characters just as powerful. "Every build is actively played at the highest level, mathematically optimized, then refined to perform at every level," the website reads. The leaderboards are just a way the group hopes to legitimize their build guides over the many others out there.

I'm used to seeing World of Warcraft characters with names made to promote their gold selling website, not players trying to promote their guides. InfinityBuilds' stunt is clever, if not a little ostentatious, but I respect the hustle. It's easier than ever to freestyle a character build in Diablo 4 with the improvements in Lord of Hatred, but there will always be people who want the comfort of playing something that has been refined and tested by those who study the game's fluctuating meta like it's a job.

Marketing yourself through a leaderboard might get the attention of players who do actually care about that sort of thing, but the real challenge will be finding a foothold in Google (and YouTube) search results—which is where most people go looking for guides. The rank 1 stamp of approval can only get you so far, especially for a game that appeals to a much wider variety of players than something like Path of Exile.

Right now, the leaderboards are still shifting around quite a bit. The strongest classes are surprisingly not the two new classes, paladins and warlocks, but sorcerers and barbarians. Sorcerers have a popular build right now where they fry everything in their path with lightning orbs, and barbarians are enjoying the benefits of becoming a walking tornado with the return of 'spin-to-win' builds using the Whirlwind skill. I certainly don't have the time to min-max my characters as much as the players in InfinityBuilds do to top the leaderboards, but I'm excited to check their builds out if only to see how they tick.