Designer Wyatt Cheng identifies the two player groups that Blizzard are aiming to please with 1.05. “As the game’s been out for awhile now, we’re finding players are stratifying into different audiences. You’ve got your player who has 1,000 hours played on their character and diablo 3 equipment in the game, they have absolutely amazing gear, and they need more of a challenge. And then you have somebody else who just hit 60 last week for the first time because they’ve been playing for one or two hours a week since it came out and they’ve been having a blast but they’re just rolling into Inferno now.

“The goal of the system is to allow players set a monster power level, and the higher they set the level the bigger the bonuses they’ll get to buy diablo 3 gold and magic find, experience and loot drops — but the harder the game will be,” game director Jay Wilson told IGN. “It’s a system we’ve put in to allow players to have a lot more control over the difficulty of the game.”

Monster Power mode was teased in a recent Diablo 3 blog post detailing planned changes to be included in the upcoming 1.05 patch. Blizzard have likened it to Diablo 2′s “players 8″ setting, which would set monster difficulty to match eight players and gain diablo 3 gold even if there were only one or two warriors present. The results? More loot, more experience, and a greater challenge. Blizzard have been talking to IGN about Monster Power, Inferno Machine, and where the long awaited PvP mode is at.