Season 11 is shaping up to be one of Diablo 4’s most competitive pivots yet, and players felt it the moment information started hiccuping instead of flowing. When GameRant threw a 502 error on its Tower leaderboards beta coverage, it wasn’t just a website problem—it was a disruption in how endgame grinders track meta shifts, PTR feedback, and leaderboard viability. In a live-service ARPG where optimization windows are measured in hours, not weeks, delayed intel changes how players prepare.
That error hit right as Blizzard began stress-testing The Tower as a true endgame benchmark. For leaderboard chasers, missing early clarification on scoring logic, reset cadence, or beta limitations can mean wasted builds, misallocated glyph XP, or incorrect assumptions about what actually matters for ranking.
Why a 502 Error Matters More Than It Sounds
A 502 from a major outlet usually means traffic overload or upstream server failure, but in the Diablo ecosystem it creates an information vacuum. GameRant, like IGN, often translates raw patch notes into actionable knowledge—how systems interact, what’s experimental versus locked, and where Blizzard is clearly fishing for data. When that pipeline stalls, theorycrafting communities are left piecing together fragmented dev posts and secondhand summaries.
This is especially dangerous during a beta-style rollout like The Tower leaderboards. Early misreads about how floors scale, how affixes roll, or whether clears prioritize time, deaths, or completion can hard-lock players into inefficient endgame loops.
The Tower Leaderboards Beta and Blizzard’s Controlled Messaging
The Tower isn’t just another activity; it’s Blizzard testing a repeatable, skill-forward ladder that sits between Pit pushing and open-world RNG farming. Leaderboards track performance under tightly controlled conditions, limiting cheese builds and rewarding consistency, execution, and survivability under pressure. That makes clarity on rules and scoring absolutely critical.
With primary coverage temporarily inaccessible, Blizzard’s own patch notes became the only reliable source—but those notes are intentionally conservative. They explain what’s changing, not how it will feel when your DPS breakpoint misses a floor timer by two seconds or when a single death tanks a run.
What Players Should Read Between the Lines Right Now
The GameRant error doesn’t mean Season 11 info is gone; it means players need to be more critical about sources. Community testing, PTR footage, and dev comments on social channels now matter more than polished articles. Expect iteration, silent tweaks, and potential leaderboard wipes as Blizzard refines the system.
For now, the smart move is preparation over commitment. Build flexible loadouts, prioritize survivability alongside burst, and assume The Tower’s final scoring model will reward clean execution over raw damage. As coverage stabilizes, the players who adapted early—not the ones who chased incomplete info—will control the ladder.
Season 11 at a Glance: Blizzard’s Core Goals for Endgame and Competitive Play
Coming off the uncertainty around The Tower’s beta rollout, Season 11 makes Blizzard’s priorities clearer than the patch notes alone suggest. This isn’t a loot-bloat season or a narrative-heavy reset. It’s a systems-first update aimed squarely at tightening endgame skill expression and stress-testing competitive infrastructure.
Blizzard is less concerned with how fast players reach endgame and more focused on what they do once they’re there. Every major change in Season 11 feeds into repeatable challenge, measurable performance, and cleaner separation between casual clears and leaderboard-level execution.
From RNG Spikes to Skill-Curated Difficulty
Season 11 continues Diablo 4’s slow pivot away from pure RNG dominance. While gear rolls still matter, activities like The Tower deliberately reduce variance by standardizing encounters, affixes, and progression rules. The goal is to make success hinge on decision-making, positioning, cooldown timing, and death management rather than lottery-tier drops.
This is especially evident in how floors scale. Instead of exponential stat inflation, difficulty ramps through layered mechanics, tighter DPS checks, and punish windows that demand I-frame awareness. If you overcommit or mismanage aggro, the system is designed to expose it immediately.
The Tower as a Competitive Litmus Test
At a high level, The Tower is Blizzard asking a simple question: can Diablo 4 support a fair, repeatable, skill-based leaderboard? Season 11 doesn’t fully answer that yet, but it establishes the testing ground. By isolating variables and enforcing fixed conditions, Blizzard can evaluate balance issues that were previously masked by open-world chaos.
For competitive players, this reframes endgame progression. Raw clears are no longer the only metric. Consistency across runs, minimal deaths, and efficient floor routing now directly impact leaderboard placement. It’s less about one perfect run and more about mastering the system over time.
Endgame Diversity Without Fragmentation
Another core goal of Season 11 is avoiding endgame sprawl. Rather than adding multiple disconnected activities, Blizzard is positioning The Tower as a central pillar that complements existing loops like Nightmare Dungeons and Pit pushing. Each mode feeds different needs: gear optimization, XP efficiency, and competitive ranking.
This matters because it reduces burnout. Players aren’t forced to abandon their preferred grind to stay competitive. Instead, Season 11 encourages cross-mode preparation, where survivability learned in Pit pushing directly translates into cleaner Tower clears.
Preparing Players for Iteration, Not Finality
Perhaps the most important takeaway is that Season 11 is intentionally unfinished by design. Blizzard is signaling that The Tower’s scoring, scaling, and reward structure will change, possibly mid-season. Leaderboard wipes, tuning passes, and rule adjustments aren’t failures; they’re expected outcomes of this beta-style approach.
For players, that means treating Season 11 as a learning environment. Builds that prioritize flexibility, defensive layers, and adaptable DPS profiles will age better than hyper-specialized glass cannons. The competitive edge won’t come from exploiting a single mechanic, but from understanding how Blizzard wants endgame competition to function going forward.
The Tower Explained: Core Gameplay Loop, Difficulty Scaling, and Reward Structure
At its core, The Tower is Blizzard’s attempt to distill Diablo 4’s endgame into a controlled, repeatable competitive format. Instead of sprawling dungeons or open-ended Pit scaling, players enter a fixed run structure designed to test execution, decision-making, and build stability under pressure. Every run starts on equal footing, removing many of the external variables that previously skewed leaderboard competition.
The result is an activity that feels closer to a roguelike gauntlet than a traditional ARPG grind. Success isn’t just about raw DPS; it’s about managing cooldowns, positioning around dangerous hitboxes, and minimizing mistakes that compound over multiple floors. One death doesn’t end a run, but it absolutely dents your score.
Core Gameplay Loop: Floors, Modifiers, and Momentum
Each Tower run is broken into sequential floors, with enemy density and elite frequency increasing as you climb. Early floors are intentionally forgiving, giving players space to establish rhythm and resource flow. By the mid-floors, elite affixes begin stacking aggressively, forcing tighter rotations and smarter aggro control.
What separates strong runs from average ones is momentum. Efficient clears reward players with faster transitions and better score pacing, while sloppy pulls or panic deaths stall progress. There’s no room for AFK clears here; every floor is a micro-test of execution.
Environmental modifiers also play a larger role than expected. Certain floors subtly favor mobility-heavy builds, while others punish stationary damage setups with overlapping AoEs and forced movement checks. Learning these patterns is key for consistent leaderboard performance.
Difficulty Scaling: Skill Checks Over Gear Checks
Unlike Nightmare Dungeons or Pit tiers, Tower difficulty scales laterally rather than infinitely. Enemy health and damage ramp predictably, but the real pressure comes from layered mechanics and reduced margin for error. This keeps runs competitive across classes without letting extreme gear advantages completely dominate the ladder.
Defensive layering matters more than raw armor or resist caps. Builds that rely on a single cheat-death or barrier window tend to crumble deeper into a run. Consistent mitigation, uptime on I-frames, and cooldown discipline are what allow players to push higher floors cleanly.
This is where Season 11’s beta philosophy becomes obvious. Blizzard is clearly testing how much mechanical complexity players can handle before the mode becomes oppressive. Expect tuning passes here, especially around elite stacking and damage spikes that feel unfair rather than challenging.
Reward Structure: Scoring, Leaderboards, and Incentives
The Tower’s rewards are split between tangible loot and intangible prestige. Gear drops are competitive but not mandatory, ensuring the mode doesn’t replace existing endgame farms. The real prize is leaderboard positioning, driven by a scoring system that values speed, deaths, and completion depth.
Every decision impacts score. Pushing one more risky floor can boost placement or completely tank a run if it ends in multiple deaths. This risk-reward tension is intentional, forcing players to decide whether to play safe or gamble for leaderboard movement.
Importantly, Blizzard is treating rewards as flexible during Season 11. Score weighting, reset cadence, and even leaderboard categories are all subject to change as data comes in. For competitive players, the takeaway is simple: focus on mastering the system, not exploiting it. The Tower isn’t just another activity; it’s Blizzard’s blueprint for the future of Diablo 4’s competitive endgame.
Leaderboards Beta Deep Dive: How Rankings Are Calculated, Reset Rules, and Class Separation
With the reward framework established, the real test of The Tower begins at the leaderboard layer. This is where Blizzard’s competitive intent becomes impossible to ignore. Season 11’s beta implementation isn’t just tracking clears; it’s dissecting how you clear, how consistently you perform, and how cleanly you execute under pressure.
How Tower Rankings Are Calculated
At its core, Tower leaderboard ranking is driven by a composite score, not a single metric. Floor depth is the anchor, but it’s only the starting point. Two players reaching the same floor can end up dozens of placements apart based on how they got there.
Time is the first major modifier. Faster clears generate higher scores, but the system heavily penalizes reckless speed. If rushing floors results in deaths or sloppy engagements, the time bonus quickly evaporates.
Deaths are the most punishing variable in the equation. Each death applies a steep score reduction, and multiple deaths scale that penalty aggressively. This discourages glass-cannon fishing strategies and rewards builds with stable mitigation and recovery.
There’s also evidence of performance weighting tied to elite kills and objective efficiency. While Blizzard hasn’t published exact formulas, internal testing strongly suggests that clean elite clears and minimal backtracking subtly boost final scores. This pushes players toward mastery rather than brute forcing layouts.
What Changed From Traditional Diablo Leaderboards
Unlike Greater Rift or Pit-style ladders, Tower leaderboards don’t reward infinite scaling. There’s a defined ceiling on difficulty, which shifts competition from who can survive the longest to who can execute best within constraints.
This is a philosophical shift. Instead of endless stat inflation, the Tower measures consistency, mechanical precision, and decision-making. Cooldown alignment, positioning, and knowing when to disengage matter as much as raw DPS.
Another key change is reduced reliance on snapshot exploits or single-run fishing. Because deaths and pacing matter so much, leaderboard viability comes from repeatable performance, not one lucky run with perfect RNG.
For competitive players, this means preparation beats improvisation. Route planning, enemy priority, and understanding which affixes are run-enders at higher floors will separate top-percentile players from the rest of the pack.
Reset Rules and Competitive Cadence
Season 11’s Tower leaderboards operate on scheduled resets rather than permanent seasonal standings. Blizzard is currently testing shorter reset windows, likely weekly or bi-weekly, to keep competition fresh and prevent early dominance from locking out latecomers.
Each reset wipes leaderboard placements but does not remove player familiarity. This creates a skill curve where experienced Tower runners gain a significant edge as the season progresses. Knowledge compounds even when rankings don’t.
Importantly, resets are not tied to balance patches. If a class receives mid-season tuning, leaderboard resets won’t automatically follow. This puts pressure on Blizzard to monitor outliers quickly and adjust before competitive integrity suffers.
For players chasing top placements, the implication is clear. You can’t sit on a single god run and coast. Consistent execution across multiple reset cycles is the real measure of leaderboard strength.
Class Separation and Why It Matters
One of the most impactful beta features is full class separation on Tower leaderboards. Barbarians aren’t competing directly with Sorcerers, and Druids aren’t racing Rogues for the same slots.
This solves a long-standing Diablo problem. Balance gaps still exist, but they no longer invalidate competition for entire classes. A well-played off-meta build can now matter within its own ecosystem.
Class separation also gives Blizzard cleaner data. If a single class dominates its own ladder, that’s a tuning problem. If multiple builds within a class are competitive, that’s a success signal for internal balance goals.
For players, this opens up real strategic choice. You’re no longer forced to reroll just to compete. Mastering your class’s strengths, defensive tools, and mobility options becomes the path to leaderboard relevance.
What Competitive Players Should Be Preparing For
The Tower leaderboard beta is clearly a testing ground, not a finished product. Expect scoring weights to shift, death penalties to be tuned, and reset timing to evolve throughout Season 11.
What won’t change is the direction. Blizzard wants a leaderboard system that rewards execution over exploits, consistency over luck, and knowledge over raw hours played.
If you’re serious about climbing, now is the time to learn the system, not fight it. Track your deaths, analyze your pacing, and refine your defensive layers. The Tower isn’t asking how hard you can hit. It’s asking how cleanly you can play when everything goes wrong.
What’s Changed in the Beta Update: Key Adjustments Since Initial Tower Reveal
Since Blizzard’s first Tower reveal, the Season 11 beta update has quietly reshaped how the system actually plays at the top end. These aren’t cosmetic tweaks or UI-only fixes. They directly affect pacing, risk assessment, and how leaderboard runs are planned from the first pull to the final floor.
If you tested the early version and walked away with a firm opinion, it’s worth resetting expectations. The Tower now plays closer to a competitive gauntlet than a raw DPS check, and several underlying systems have been rebalanced to reinforce that shift.
Scoring Formula Rebalanced Around Clean Clears
The most important change is how score is calculated. Early Tower builds heavily favored raw clear speed, which pushed glass-cannon setups and encouraged reckless pulling. In the beta update, Blizzard redistributed scoring weight toward survival efficiency and completion consistency.
Deaths now carry a steeper penalty, and repeated revives during a run meaningfully tank your final score. This makes defensive layers, I-frame management, and cooldown discipline just as important as burst windows. You can still play fast, but sloppy aggression is no longer optimal.
Enemy Scaling and Floor Density Adjustments
Enemy health and damage scaling across higher Tower floors has been smoothed out. Initial versions spiked too aggressively, creating sudden difficulty walls that felt more like RNG than skill checks. The beta update evens out those curves, especially in the mid-to-high floor range where most leaderboard runs will live.
At the same time, mob density has been normalized. You’ll see fewer extreme empty floors and fewer unavoidable death balls. This rewards players who understand aggro control, positioning, and AoE timing instead of praying for favorable spawns.
Affix Pool Refinement to Reduce RNG Swings
One of the loudest early complaints was affix volatility. Certain modifier combinations could instantly end a run, while others were borderline free points. Blizzard has since trimmed the affix pool and adjusted weighting so that lethal overlaps appear less frequently.
Dangerous affixes still exist, but they’re more readable and counterable. This puts emphasis back on player knowledge rather than dice rolls. If you die now, it’s more likely because of a missed dodge, poor spacing, or bad cooldown sequencing, not an unavoidable hitbox overlap.
Checkpoint and Death Handling Tweaks
Checkpoint behavior has also been adjusted to discourage brute-force progression. Early Tower builds allowed players to muscle through bad floors by eating deaths and continuing forward. In the beta update, repeated deaths on the same floor rapidly erode your score potential.
This reinforces Blizzard’s stated goal for the Tower: execution over endurance. Competitive players are incentivized to reset bad runs early rather than limp through them, which keeps leaderboard data cleaner and rewards players who can identify when a run is no longer worth salvaging.
Leaderboard Update Cadence and Data Tracking Improvements
Behind the scenes, Blizzard has improved how Tower runs are logged and reflected on the leaderboards. Scores now update more consistently, with fewer delays and fewer instances of missing or misreported runs. This matters more than it sounds for high-end competitors tracking incremental gains.
The beta update also refines how runs are categorized internally, giving Blizzard clearer insight into build diversity, clear times, and death patterns. For players, this means future tuning is more likely to target real outliers instead of broad, heavy-handed nerfs.
What These Changes Signal for the Tower’s Future
Taken together, these adjustments make the Tower feel less like an experiment and more like a foundation. Blizzard is clearly steering the system toward a repeatable, skill-forward competitive mode rather than a seasonal novelty.
For endgame grinders and leaderboard chasers, the message is clear. This isn’t about finding the most broken interaction and riding it until a hotfix lands. It’s about building resilient characters, learning enemy patterns, and executing under pressure. The beta update doesn’t lower the ceiling. It raises the bar on how clean you have to play to reach it.
Endgame Meta Implications: Build Optimization, Group vs Solo Play, and Exploit Watch
With execution now fully in the spotlight, the Tower’s leaderboard beta is already reshaping what “optimal” looks like at endgame. Raw damage still matters, but Season 11’s changes heavily reward builds that can maintain tempo without bleeding points to deaths, resets, or sloppy positioning. The meta is shifting away from glass-cannon gimmicks and toward consistent, repeatable clears.
Build Optimization: Consistency Beats Peak DPS
The biggest takeaway for buildcrafting is that survivability and uptime are no longer optional stats. Barrier access, damage reduction layering, and reliable crowd control are climbing in value because every death directly undermines leaderboard efficiency. A build that clears five percent slower but never dies will almost always outscore a higher DPS setup that collapses under pressure.
Cooldown alignment is also more important than ever. Tower floors are structured to punish downtime, meaning burst windows need to line up cleanly with elite packs and boss phases. Builds that rely on long cooldowns without backup defensive tools are far riskier now, especially deeper into a run.
Group Play vs Solo Play: Diverging Optimization Paths
Group runs and solo runs are starting to feel like entirely different games at the top end. In groups, coordinated debuffs, stagger chaining, and aggro control can trivialize certain Tower encounters, letting DPS players lean harder into damage. However, a single misplay can still cascade into a full run collapse, making communication and role clarity mandatory.
Solo players, by contrast, need self-sufficiency above all else. Builds that can generate their own Vulnerable, apply consistent crowd control, and recover from positioning mistakes are dominating early leaderboard placements. Expect solo metas to favor hybrid builds that sacrifice peak damage for control and recovery tools.
Class Balance Pressure and Emerging Outliers
As leaderboard data stabilizes, clear patterns are already forming around which classes handle Tower pacing best. Classes with strong mobility and built-in mitigation are thriving because they can reposition without losing DPS uptime. Meanwhile, slower or setup-heavy builds are falling behind unless heavily optimized.
This puts pressure on Blizzard to make targeted adjustments rather than sweeping balance passes. The improved data tracking means outliers will be easier to identify, and players should expect precision tuning aimed at specific interactions instead of blanket buffs or nerfs.
Exploit Watch: What Blizzard Is Clearly Monitoring
The beta update sends a clear warning to exploit hunters. Score decay from repeated deaths, tighter run validation, and cleaner leaderboard logging all point to Blizzard actively watching for abuse. Infinite scaling interactions, snapshotting bugs, or unintended immunity loops are unlikely to survive long once they surface.
For competitive players, the risk-reward equation has changed. Chasing a questionable interaction might net short-term gains, but it also risks invalidated runs or retroactive fixes. Season 11’s Tower rewards players who invest time into mastering legitimate mechanics, not those gambling on loopholes staying open.
Competitive Preparation Guide: How to Gear, Practice, and Push Efficiently for Leaderboards
With exploits under tighter surveillance and balance pressure mounting, Season 11’s Tower leaderboard beta demands disciplined preparation. Raw DPS alone won’t carry runs anymore. Efficient pushes come from deliberate gearing, targeted practice, and understanding how the Tower scores consistency as much as speed.
Gear for Consistency First, Burst Second
In the Tower, death penalties and score decay punish glass-cannon setups harder than ever. Prioritize defensive layers that preserve uptime: damage reduction while injured, conditional barriers, and reliable Fortify or shielding loops. If you’re dying once per floor, your build is already non-competitive.
Stat-wise, cap your core breakpoints before chasing perfect rolls. Attack speed thresholds, cooldown reduction loops, and resource sustain matter more than squeezing out another five percent crit damage. A build that maintains DPS through chaos will always outscore one that spikes and collapses.
Build Validation: Prove It Survives Bad RNG
Before pushing leaderboard attempts, stress-test your build in unfavorable conditions. Run Tower floors with intentionally poor affixes, awkward enemy combinations, or reduced visibility. If your build only functions when everything lines up, it won’t survive high-rank pacing.
Pay attention to recovery tools. Can you re-engage after being knocked out of position? Do you have I-frames or unstoppable access on demand, not just on cooldown alignment? The best Tower builds assume mistakes will happen and are designed to absorb them.
Practice the Tower Like a Speedrun, Not a Dungeon
Leaderboard players treat Tower floors as rehearsed encounters, not reactive content. Learn spawn patterns, elite sequencing, and which enemies can be safely ignored versus hard-focused. Time saved from smarter routing compounds faster than marginal DPS upgrades.
Practice clean transitions between floors. Cooldown alignment, resource banking, and positioning before the next wave starts can shave seconds off every segment. Over an entire run, that efficiency is often the difference between top 100 and top 10.
Understand Scoring Pressure and Death Economics
Season 11’s beta scoring heavily discourages sloppy aggression. Every death doesn’t just cost time; it erodes your run’s scoring potential. Sometimes slowing down for a safer clear yields a higher final placement than gambling on risky pulls.
This also changes how you use consumables and ultimates. Holding cooldowns for guaranteed clears is often smarter than firing them on trash. Leaderboard pushes reward patience and precision, not constant button mashing.
Solo vs Group Prep: Optimize for Your Lane
Solo players should gear and practice for autonomy. Self-applied Vulnerable, reliable crowd control, and sustain trump theoretical max DPS. You are your own tank, debuffer, and damage dealer, and your build should reflect that reality.
Group players need role clarity before stepping into serious pushes. Assign stagger control, debuff application, and elite focus roles explicitly. The Tower exposes overlap inefficiencies fast, and redundant effects waste precious seconds.
Schedule Your Pushes Around Peak Performance
Leaderboard climbing isn’t just mechanical; it’s mental. Push attempts should happen when you’re focused, warmed up, and free from distractions. Fatigue leads to misplays, and misplays are brutally expensive under Season 11’s scoring rules.
Use off-hours for practice and theorycrafting. Save serious leaderboard attempts for when you can chain multiple clean runs back-to-back. Momentum matters, and the Tower rewards players who treat pushing like a competitive session, not a casual grind.
Future Outlook: Risks, Community Feedback Signals, and What to Expect Before Full Release
With optimal routing, clean execution, and disciplined pushing now established as the baseline for Tower success, the bigger question becomes where this system goes next. Season 11’s Tower leaderboards are explicitly labeled a beta, and Blizzard has left enough seams exposed to suggest meaningful changes are still coming. Understanding the risks and reading the community signals early gives competitive players a real edge before full release locks systems in.
Balance Volatility Is the Biggest Short-Term Risk
The Tower currently magnifies balance gaps more aggressively than any other endgame activity. Classes with reliable AoE uptime, fast stagger application, and flexible cooldown cycling are disproportionately favored under time-based scoring. That makes small numerical buffs or nerfs feel massive when translated into leaderboard placement.
Expect frequent tuning passes before full release. If you’re chasing rankings, build flexibility matters more than ever. Have backup skill variants, alternative Paragon paths, and gear swaps ready so a single hotfix doesn’t invalidate weeks of practice overnight.
Scoring Transparency Will Be a Community Pressure Point
One of the loudest early feedback signals centers on how opaque the scoring breakdown currently feels. Players understand deaths, time, and floor completion matter, but the exact weighting remains fuzzy. That uncertainty fuels frustration when two seemingly similar runs land far apart on the leaderboard.
Blizzard has historically responded to this kind of feedback with clearer UI breakdowns rather than mechanical overhauls. Expect expanded post-run summaries, clearer penalties, and more visible performance metrics before the Tower exits beta. That added clarity will raise the skill ceiling by making optimization more deliberate instead of guesswork.
Class Representation and Meta Compression Are Being Closely Watched
Early leaderboard data already shows signs of meta compression. A handful of builds dominate top placements, while others struggle to compete regardless of execution quality. That’s a dangerous perception for a competitive system meant to reward mastery, not just class selection.
Before full release, targeted buffs to underrepresented archetypes are likely. These won’t necessarily raise raw DPS, but instead improve survivability, crowd control consistency, or cooldown flow. Players should track PTR notes closely, as “small” quality-of-life changes can radically reshape Tower viability.
Expect Structural Tweaks, Not a Full Redesign
Despite the beta label, the Tower’s core identity is solid. Floor pacing, escalating pressure, and death economics all align with Blizzard’s stated goal of skill-based endgame competition. That makes a full redesign unlikely.
Instead, expect structural refinements. Floor modifiers may rotate more aggressively, enemy density could be normalized across tiers, and spawn logic will likely be tightened to reduce RNG-heavy outcomes. These changes won’t lower difficulty, but they will make success feel more earned and repeatable.
What Competitive Players Should Do Right Now
Treat Season 11 as a live training ground, not a finished ladder. Focus on fundamentals that will survive tuning passes: routing discipline, cooldown management, death avoidance, and role clarity. Those skills translate regardless of balance shifts or scoring tweaks.
Most importantly, stay engaged with feedback channels and patch notes. The players who adapt fastest during the beta phase will dominate when the Tower finally goes live in its full form. Season 11 isn’t just about climbing now—it’s about positioning yourself to own the leaderboard when it truly matters.