It sounds like you’re just a pet guy who doesn’t care for character armor models. I think many of D4’s shop cosmetics look cool. Maybe the newer ones more so than the older ones, but if you are talking about visual styles and art then that’s very subjective. My opinion as well as your opinion is very subjective. No one is making you buy the cosmetics if that’s not your thing, you’ll save money that way. They are optional, they give you no power nor gameplay advantage, people buy them for fun or to look cool because I myself as well as many others like to customize our characters. If you don’t then that’s fine. My best friend only reads American Realism. I could not get him into any science fiction or fantasy novels, he only reads American realism. He cannot suspend his disbelief and that’s fine. You could say the the LotR trilogy is the best trilogy over but he would disagree and hate the films. It’s subjective. I spend money on cosmetics sometimes, you don’t like them, you save money. to each his own.
You do realize that in D4, Unlike either PoE 1 & 2 you are the only one
Who can see your cosmetic purchases with the possible exception of the
Portals? And your fine with that? BTW That’s a deliberate choice on
Buzzards part since making those cosmetics visible to anyone other
Than you would be more expensive for Buzzard? If your fine with that
Good for you.
Sorry but not true. I play with a regular group of about a dozen people and I can see them playing with their cosmetic purchases. When in the open world I see people playing with cosmetics all the time. A few seasons ago there was a samurai skin I was using and I would routinely see other people with the same skin.
While money laundering through games does exist this would be a bad way to do it.
You’d have to buy x many copies to maintain x many accounts across a farm which likely isn’t very well distributed because you’re region locked to the servers you play on. To get that up and running would take years to go slowly enough to not create obvious purchase patterns. Basically no one is going to randomly buy 50 copies of Diablo 4 in a bundle without raising at least a single eyebrow.
Nice! Everything is a racket.
Here’s where what you’re describing fits in the context of altars:
If a preconceived group of 4 each go to a different dungeon and run it to see if there is an altar and share it once found amongst the other 3 this is fine. This is splitting up and sharing the work.
What’s actually happening is that people (some who are extorting others for payment I guess) find these altars and then broadcast publicly that they will allow access to them. The grouping is therefore not preconceived and the there is no initial agreement on how anything is done.
The difference in these scenarios (and the ones you listed) is the communication process and the design process. If you carry a friend through boss runs or whatever you’ve both agreed to do this before the activity therefore risk of extortion or whatever is zero. On the design side you can’t circumvent the process of spawning the boss (you pay the mat price) therefore it is working as designed and your charity is your problem.
When cheating occurs it’s almost always the opposite; someone finds a way to circumvent the game’s normal function (in this case, joining a cave of someone else who you had no way of even interacting with normally to take something that you specifically did not work for) and without pre-agreement has the power to extort those who want the [whatever] and in some cases I guess use it as in demanding gold for access.
These two scenarios clearly don’t share the same spirit of collaboration even if they have the same outcome.
I’ll use the Monster Hunter cheat case:
Let’s say you’re young and you want to beat Nergigante.
Option 1: Join a group, do your best, everyone wins.
Option 2: Join a … “group”, watch someone one-hit him “somehow”, everyone wins.
Is all group content cheating? No.
Are there times when cheating happens in a group? Yes.
check the ‘diablo 3 RMAH’ 10 years ago.
it was heavily exploited for money laundering, investigated by agents, and was shutting down.
and if you worry about managing 50 accounts, there is something called ’ automated trading bots’. one operator can control thousands. 
Alrighty let’s start with the obvious, developer intent is ambiguous. You claim that the developers “did not intend” for players to join a random person in a dungeon to access the altar. However, if this were truly unintended, Blizzard could have easily implemented restrictions, such as making the altar instance-locked, requiring prior dungeon participation, or limiting interaction to pre-existing party members. The fact that none of these restrictions exist suggests that the system is working as designed, even if it leads to unexpected player behavior.
Next up let’s talk about preconceived groups vs. open groups as it’s an arbitrary distinction. You argue that a pre-planned group of 4 splitting up to find altars and sharing them is fine, but publicly sharing them with strangers is not. This is an arbitrary distinction. The game itself does not recognize the difference between a pre-made group and a random assortment of players. Whether you find an altar alone and invite friends, or find it and invite strangers, the game mechanics remain identical. What matters is that someone is putting in effort to locate the altar and is voluntarily sharing access to it.
Currently nothing is being circumvented. You suggest that this practice “circumvents the game’s normal function.” However, this isn’t bypassing mechanics, it’s using existing mechanics in an efficient way. The game allows you to join another player’s dungeon and interact with objects inside it. The system functions exactly as designed; it’s just being optimized by players. By your logic, any form of efficiency in grouping, whether it’s dungeon carries, split farming, or even simple loot sharing, would also be ‘circumventing’ the game. But efficiency isn’t cheating; it’s just smart play.
Extortion is a separate issue all together. You introduce the idea that some players might charge gold for access, framing it as a form of cheating. However, this is an economic interaction, not an exploit. People pay for boss carries, gear runs, and Pit clears all the time, it’s a player-driven market. If someone is being forced into payment (i.e., scammed), that’s a social issue, not a game mechanics issue.
Now your Monster Hunter example doesn’t hold up. In that scenario, the difference is that the one-shot kill likely involves an actual cheat (such as hacked stats, modded damage, or an exploit). In Diablo 4, there is no external modification or glitch abuse, players are using in-game mechanics as they exist. A better comparison would be players joining a lobby where a high-level hunter helps kill Nergigante quickly. That’s just an efficient way to play, not a cheat.
Your entire argument hinges on an arbitrary distinction between pre-agreed groups and open groups, and a misunderstanding of what constitutes “circumventing” mechanics. If the devs truly intended to prevent this, they would have locked altars behind participation conditions. Since they haven’t, this is simply an efficient way to interact with the seasonal mechanic, not cheating.
So this brings me to look first at the Hoarfrost Demise efficiency loop.
The design and intent is obvious for the powers; 80% of the powers are deterministic and you need to pay for them with season currency. The four that are locked behind randomness are supposed to be found through serendipity. If we agree with this then the aggression which the playerbase picked up to acquire these by means of forcibly running the shortest dungeon(s) possible in seconds repeatedly to complete the acquisition was not intended.
Saying, “If they didn’t want that to happen they could have …” is true but it only makes sense to say that after it happened. This is key because intent has to be separated from occurrence; the fact that you can run HD 5 times in a minute by clicking a button and resetting the dungeon and re-entering is definitely a real occurrence but it is also obviously not developer intent.
The point of expressing the difference between preconceived groups is talking about player communication. In the preconceived case extortion is impossible while in the open group case extortion is not. This is the human element of exploits. So if you find an altar and invite your buddy who you agreed to go altar hunting with this is not the same as if you randomly come across an altar and offer access to the highest bidder. I find this to be obvious but maybe it is not.
This is where we get into an untruth. The first key definition to all exploits is that the game always allows you to do them. This is important because when we talk about bypassing mechanics we’re not talking about whether it is possible but rather whether it is supposed to occur. Stepping out for a second:
You can kill certain bosses through the fog wall in (original) Demon’s Souls. The game “allows” you to do that. The game “allows” you to interact with the bosses health pool. The developer never fixed it. Does that mean it’s “intended”? Obviously, no.
Stepping back in we’re now in the place where we ask, “If you don’t even run a single dungeon in the whole season but have all the powers from buying access to them via other player’s efforts did you circumvent the event?” Yes. You can find all of the Lost Altars in the season without actually running a single dungeon. You can literally teleport in, tag it, and leave. It doesn’t really get much clearer than that in that it’s not intended.
This is going to the Easter Egg hunt, where there is a prize for having the most eggs, sitting in a lawn chair and not looking at all then buying the eggs everyone else found and getting the prize. That’s just cheating.
Now is all cheating “bad”? Eh.
I don’t think it’s a form of cheating based on the risk of extortion. It’s just that all cheating has the risk of extortion. But I agree let’s set extortion aside as it has it’s own rabbit hole.
This is where the loop begins because, “What is an exploit?”, is the question. All exploits use in-game mechanics and what you call “glitch-abuse” is equally known in some circles as “developer incompetence”. It becomes an intention problem. If the developer intended for a multiplier of 1.5 but entered 15 is it “glitch-abuse” to capitalize on that or is it “developer incompetence”? And in either case it’s just in-game mechanics as they exist.
I’m not suggesting we go down the philosophical route and I probably won’t touch on this point again but it’s arbitrary to describe one form of circumvention of intent as bad versus another. We saw this through all of Season 6 with the Spiritborn with a lot of people in both camps where some said that the developer’s errors were their fault and they weren’t exploiting anything at all and others saying that the developer’s intentions mattered more than it was obviously being exploited.
I still think that at the end of the day this is a bad take. We have so much historical proof that players do things that no one foresees so the idea that developers would predict every method of circumvention is just not reasonable. I would get it if it was local to Diablo 4. Just this game. It’s not. It’s every single game.
My main contention with it though, as stated before, is that it only makes sense after it happens. The fact that you can’t build a stable version of that argument outside of the conditions which it exists is fallacious. Specific name: Fallacy of the antecedent.
You’re right to point out that we can’t say for sure what the developer’s intent was. That’s a big part of the issue here. We don’t have direct insight into their thinking, so saying something “wasn’t intended” is tricky. If they didn’t want players to exploit the altar system by hopping into random dungeons, they could’ve easily put in restrictions, but they didn’t, which suggests it’s a feature that’s open for players to use as they see fit.
This kind of efficiency doesn’t break the game mechanics; it’s just players finding the quickest way to get what they want. It’s no different than using the game’s existing systems for loot sharing or dungeon carries.
As for the idea that this creates a market where people charge gold for access, that’s not cheating either. It’s just the game’s economy at work. If someone wants to sell access to a dungeon or share an altar, that’s their choice. If someone gets scammed, that’s a social issue, not a game mechanic problem.
And regarding the exploit comparison, whether it’s glitch abuse or developer oversight, it doesn’t change the fact that players are still using the mechanics available to them. Just because something wasn’t explicitly intended doesn’t mean it’s not part of the game’s design.
Ultimately, the game lets players interact with others in creative ways. If the developers didn’t want this kind of behavior, they would’ve added restrictions, whether before the patch came out, or afterward. But they didn’t, and players found an efficient way to make use of the system, so calling it an exploit or saying it circumvents the mechanics isn’t really accurate.
I note that there is a button in the UI explicitly for resetting dungeons. It seems to me that if such a tool exists, then fairly surely the devs intended for us to be able to re-set dungeons & run them repeatedly. If that wasn’t their intention, then I’m mystified as to why they’d include a tool allowing you to do exactly that.
I mean, of course, that maybe that wasn’t their intent, but I think the inference is pretty strongly backed.
We know what the intent was because it exists. IF they dint want ppl doing this then they could have easily prevented it. Its working as intended.
That being said this season and game is buggy as hell so maybe just maybe they actually dint.
I haven’t seen any economy. Course…I’m in T3 on eternal…I don’t see anyone at all 
Reading this was 5 seconds of my life that I will never get back.
There actually IS a restriction on them - they time out after a while (20 minutes? Maybe?) after first activation. Either that, or it’s a maximum of ~15 uses.
Which just reinforces your notion that it is indeed 100% intended to be able to invite others.
well you just take d2 where drop rates are adjusted to factor in botting and duping, so if you don’t do that (or just buy things for 10 cents on a rmt site) you won’t find jack all. tbh, i don’t want the game to be balanced around cheaters.
No, you’re not wrong/taking crazy pills. The only real argument about duping in this game to be had is it is against the EULA, thus people should be banned for doing it because they are violating it.
Otherwise it has no impact here in a mostly single player game with absolutely no competitive element. The game is and has been trivial for a long time, but for some reason people obsess over GA’s so get upset somebody else got completely unnecessary gear before them. What’s more hilarious is many you are arguing with swear they don’t even trade anyway lol.
Well that’s fair since I’ve had a few of those coming from your direction
As well, I can only hope you didn’t find my rant, As I’ve found each and
Every one of yours🥱and I’m sure much of your audience feels the
Same😴
Every single person who says duping does not affect them because the dont trade is dreadfully and provably wrong. GGG dev did a video on why from 2 years ago or so. Duping degrades faith in a game. Its hard to keep getting new players into a game if its known to be a cheaters paradise. Eventually this will destroy a game and all your friends will quit and your guild will fall apart and you will be left alone until the game is finally discontinued or an empty shell.
There can only be one reason why they are tolerated. Because it’s more
Profitable for Buzzard that way…Until it isn’t of course 
Yup Buzzards real good at ignoring things when it’s profitable for them
To do so 
I totally agree. The game lacks real difficulty, and items are so common that they’re practically everywhere. Duping and hacking are out of control, making everything feel worthless. I even had someone offer me 6000 gems or runes for just one item, which just goes to show how broken the system really is.
The same GGG let a 200 div item be obtainable by everybody that wanted one for 8-40 div for 2-3 weeks. Because the game actually has an economy and it’s currency based, that absolutely affected it. There are leaderboards, etc. So everybody that engaged with it got several tiers of currency higher of gear than they normally would have quickly. You have smart people that bought several of them in 3+ mirror level gear on multiple characters cornering x markets because they are swimming in currency.
None of that matters in D4. You have no super rare items, and 1 GA is all you need at most to do everything in the game. Everything. It’s all seasonal but because this game has so little people make finding multiple GA items their chase.
It would not stop me from finishing a season journey in a matter of hours just like I have been doing since 3 (and I hear this one is even easier).
What I find even more hilarious? Make an AH, and if duped items can’t just be automatically identified and destroyed; allow them to be reported, in game. But then all the “I dun want a trade simulator” people (many of them whining in this very topic) would complain. Pick your poison.