World of Warcraft: The Ulduar Report: #2

The editors at GameSpy continue their foray through World of Warcraft's upcoming Ulduar raid dungeon.
As we engaged the giant, our raid members did a pretty good job of avoiding all of the flash freezes and icicles. As one of my guild members mentioned the other day, Blizzard shouldn't feel disappointed that the players on the PTR are blowing through the content so quickly. The kind of player willing to transfer a character to the test realms to sample the most challenging content likely represents the most skilled and well-equipped substrata of their player base, who aren't representative of the players at large. Of course they're going to do well; killing bosses is what they do.

The challenge lies in making the encounters challenging enough for them that they stay interested, without completely alienating the majority of the players, like what happened with Black Temple and the original Naxxramas. The hard modes that will be introduced with this content are a step in the right direction. 10- and 25-man versions of these encounters will be offered in normal and hard modes. The kinds of guilds that earn the most challenging achievements will be playing on Hard, and earning better loot.