Quite a few of us have been staring at the calendar for months now, waiting for the next big Diablo 4 update to actually land, and now it is finally locked in for Thursday, December 11, 2025 at 8:30 PM PDT, lining up with everyone planning new builds and farming Diablo 4 Items for the new season, but it is not some clean “hit the button and all the content appears” type of patch, because Season 11 is rolling things out in stages and that slow drip already has people nervous about what might go wrong again. Old Wounds From Early Seasons If you have played since launch, you probably remember how rough those early months felt. Levelling dragged, getting a mount meant jumping through weird hoops, and once you hit endgame, half the time it felt like the loot just did not respect your time. But the thing that really set people off was the Gauntlet leaderboards. When those first went live, the top pages were full of scores that did not just look suspicious, they were flat-out impossible unless something was broken. People dug into it and, sure enough, there was a massive exploit tied to Shrine buffs. Players would run around the open world, stack Channeling, Protection and all the other busted buffs, then jump straight into a Gauntlet run with all of that still active. The game did not clear the buffs at the door, so these runs started with ridiculous power from second one. You did not need to be a theorycrafter to see the problem: folks built entire setups just to abuse that bug and pushed way past what legit play could ever reach. Trust Took A Hit Once the exploit blew up, the fallout came fast. The community was shouting for Blizzard to either wipe those boards on a regular schedule or just yank them completely, because nobody wanted to grind all week only to get buried under obviously cheated scores. Blizzard eventually stepped in, removed a bunch of offenders by hand, and tried to clean things up, but that kind of manual fix never really feels strong enough. A lot of players checked the boards once, saw the mess, and just stopped caring about that whole competitive side. Even after the exploit got patched, you could hear the same line over and over on Discord and Reddit: “Why bother pushing if the next bug or exploit just ruins it again.” That is the bit that is harder to fix than any buff or damage number. Season 11’s Tower And Fresh Worries Now Season 11 is bringing in The Tower, and with it, leaderboards are stepping back into the spotlight. On paper it sounds great: climb as high as you can, show off your class and build, maybe chase your name in the top rows. But if you scroll through forum threads right now, you will see a very different tone. People are not just scared of another Shrine-style bug, they are worried about how much real money might tilt the field. Diablo 4 already sits in that awkward spot where cosmetics and boosts live close to progression, and players are asking if someone who swipes for every possible advantage will always pull ahead of the guy who just logs in, farms, and learns the fights. A lot of us want to be hyped, but after the Gauntlet fiasco, you kind of go into it with one eye on the patch notes and one eye on whether the top of the board looks “too perfect” again. Hopes, Fears And The New Climb So that is where things sit heading into the Tower era: a mix of cautious excitement and that tired, slightly jaded feeling from players who have already watched one version of this go sideways. You jump into chat and people are planning routes, arguing over which class gets the best floor times, and at the same time asking if Blizzard has really locked down exploits and paid shortcuts this time. If the runs feel fair, if gear progression feels earned instead of bought, then those fresh leaderboards might actually pull folks back into the grind and make the seasonal race fun again. If not, then Season 11 could just turn into another example players point at when they say the game never quite learned its lesson about balance, exploits, and the shadow of pay-to-win hanging over every shiny new piece of diablo 4 gear.