A team called InfinityBuilds occupied multiple top ranks on Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's Tower leaderboards under the shared name "INFbuilds," using the visibility to advertise their paid character build services. The stunt worked because Blizzard's competitive mode lacks verification tools and name reservation, letting coordinated groups treat leaderboard slots as free advertising space. Whether this matters to you depends on whether you use leaderboards to find legitimate builds or see them as already compromised by boosting and alt accounts.
What Actually Happened—and Why the Leaderboards Were Vulnerable
InfinityBuilds didn't cheat. They didn't exploit bugs or manipulate scores. They simply put multiple skilled players on the same account name, stacked the NA and EU leaderboards with "INFbuilds" entries, and let the visibility do the marketing. PC Gamer's reporting confirms the group explicitly stated this was promotional, not a pursuit of competitive glory.
The Tower mode runs 150 difficulty tiers. Leaderboards track clear speed. Blizzard has patched out the most egregious damage exploits since Lord of Hatred launched, so the rankings mostly reflect actual build optimization within current balance. That's what made InfinityBuilds' strategy viable: the leaderboards have enough integrity to be worth hijacking.
Here's the hidden variable most players miss: Blizzard designed The Tower as a personal progression tool first, competitive proving ground second. The 150-tier structure lets you push your own limits without ever looking at another player's rank. The leaderboard is grafted onto a system that doesn't need it. That design choice—progression core, competition peripheral—explains why the verification layer is thin enough to drive a marketing truck through.
Compare this to Path of Exile's ladder system, where account identity is persistent and trade league rankings tie to a single account with public profile history. Diablo 4's Tower lets you change your displayed name, doesn't lock rankings to a persistent identity, and has no "this player also placed as X" cross-reference. The competitive wrapper is presentable enough to screenshot for Twitter. It's not sturdy enough to resist being used as a billboard.
The trade-off Blizzard accepted: lower barrier to entry for casual leaderboard curiosity, zero barrier to coordinated advertising. If you choose to use the leaderboards as a build discovery tool, you gain access to top-performing setups without third-party sites. You lose confidence that the name attached to a build belongs to the person who designed it, or even a single person at all.
What This Means for Build Hunters and Competitive Players
If you're the type who checks leaderboards to find "what's working at the top," InfinityBuilds' stunt forces a decision shortcut you probably weren't using: verify the build through secondary sources, not the name attached to it.
The group is selling exactly that verification layer. Their pitch—implicit in the "INFbuilds" saturation—is that their guide service has the seal of approval that leaderboard placement alone can't provide. It's circular, but it's also honest about the problem. Most top leaderboard names you don't recognize could be alt accounts, boost buyers, or shared tags. InfinityBuilds just made the ambiguity visible.
For competitive integrity, the damage is limited because Diablo 4's endgame community never treated Tower leaderboards as esports. There's no prize pool. No Blizzard-sanctioned tournament path. The stakes are reputation and guide sales, not championship titles. That matters for how you interpret the event: this is spam in a public square, not match-fixing in a stadium.
What remains unknown:
- Whether Blizzard will add account verification, name reservation, or "one entry per account" rules to Tower leaderboards
- Whether InfinityBuilds' marketing conversion justifies the time investment (multiple players, multiple regions, presumably dozens of hours optimizing for top slots)
- Whether other guide sellers will replicate the strategy, potentially rendering leaderboard names functionally useless as identifiers
What players should watch next: Patch notes for any Tower-specific competitive restrictions, and whether Season 9 or later expansions add ranked structure with persistent identity. If Blizzard treats this as a problem to solve, the fix will likely come through account system changes, not Tower balance patches.
The One Thing to Do Differently
Stop treating any ARPG leaderboard name as a person. Treat it as a data point attached to a build snapshot, then verify the build through video clear footage, written guides with timestamped patch versions, or community vouching. The leaderboard shows you what works. It doesn't show you who to trust—and in Diablo 4's current system, it was never designed to.
