World of Warcraft: Classic

Neranja

Neranja

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Tmac said:
Your examples are Blizz hiring raiders, with the exception of the cinema guy.

Booze was saying they went wrong by not hiring content/addon builders. Like, actual fan devs.

Hiring people who break your game versus hiring people that add to your game is a different philosophy.
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I think you are jumping to the wrong conclusions here. First of all, you probably have no idea who Indalamar is by calling him a "raider."

But I'd like to turn this argument around on you: Ion was a good encounter designer, and the raids under his leadership were generally enjoyable. Only after he was promoted to a position of leadership above his competence things started to go downhill. Usually this gets called "Peter Principle." -- the same probably happened somewhere down the line with the systems team.

To circle back to the "add to the game" thing: You probably don't know how this "hiring artists" thing works in a corporate setting. Art is subjective, and unlike most of engineering you can't predict with a high degree of certainty what you'll get out of an artist. Sure fans can build some amazing stuff, but can they build more amazing stuff when:
  • on the clock, in limited time, with a deadline above their head?
  • as a team effort with others?
  • dealing with criticism, and the ability to swallow their pride when being told to fall in line by their boss?
This is the key difference between "fan made" and professional: You don't know how long it took the fan to create something, and if he can repeat the process again and again, five days a week from from 9 to 5. Also, most of those creators do it for fun, and it would kill this fun if they'd have to do it for a company. Basically this:

How+to+tell+when+you're+a+real+professional.png


Intermission pop quiz: With what we've discussed, do you think that writing computer software is more like engineering (somewhat predictable), or is it more of an art? Discuss this with your neighbor.

There is also a case to be made about never hiring your fans, because they only see the end result and not the process how it was built. While they they are slowly replacing the old staff in turnover they don't really care to learn the ropes, but each come with their own delusional ideas how to make things "better", working toward what they envision as the end product. This probably happened somewhere with Blizzard, and a case could be made that the same happened with Bioware.
 
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Tmac

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Neranja said:
I think you are jumping to the wrong conclusions here. First of all, you probably have no idea who Indalamar is by calling him a "raider."

But I'd like to turn this argument around on you: Ion was a good encounter designer, and the raids under his leadership were generally enjoyable. Only after he was promoted to a position of leadership above his competence things started to go downhill. Usually this gets called "Peter Principle." -- the same probably happened somewhere down the line with the systems team.
Click to expand...

I mean look at Furor. Dude was a raider Blizzard hired and Peter Principled to the top. Seems kind of baked into their philosophy. Raiders are not content creators, which is the point I was making. So, for Blizzard to hire famour raiders, but not famous addon builders is poignant.

Neranja said:
To circle back to the "add to the game" thing: You probably don't know how this "hiring artists" thing works in a corporate setting. Art is subjective, and unlike most of engineering you can't predict with a high degree of certainty what you'll get out of an artist. Sure fans can build some amazing stuff, but can they build more amazing stuff when:
  • on the clock, in limited time, with a deadline above their head?
  • as a team effort with others?
  • dealing with criticism, and the ability to swallow their pride when being told to fall in line by their boss?
This is the key difference between "fan made" and professional: You don't know how long it took the fan to create something, and if he can repeat the process again and again, five days a week from from 9 to 5. Also, most of those creators do it for fun, and it would kill this fun if they'd have to do it for a company. Basically this:
Click to expand...

Proving that people can build fun, functional, and desirable things is literally what the hiring process is supposed to reveal. If someone has already proven themselves capable of doing such a thing with an actual product, they are already way more qualified than someone who hasn't. All of your questions get answered at that point.

Neranja said:
Intermission pop quiz: With what we've discussed, do you think that writing computer software is more like engineering (somewhat predictable), or is it more of an art? Discuss this with your neighbor.
Click to expand...

I own a software company and have worked with both devs and designers (some of the best in the world) for the last several years in different capacities, so your tone is pretty ironic considering.

Neranja said:
There is also a case to be made about never hiring your fans, because they only see the end result and not the process how it was built. While they they are slowly replacing the old staff in turnover they don't really care to learn the ropes, but each come with their own delusional ideas how to make things "better", working toward what they envision as the end product. This probably happened somewhere with Blizzard, and a case could be made that the same happened with Bioware.
Click to expand...

I wasn't suggesting Blizzard should've hired "fanbois". I was agreeing that Blizzard should've hired more people who built popular, fun, and functional products for their games.

I can't speak to Blizzard's current hiring process or who makes the "making things better" decisions. Alls I know is that Vanilla was a masterpiece and it was 10/10 because of the people there at the time.
 
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BoozeCube

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What some of you log jammers are missing is I wasn't like OMG Blizzard should hire fan bois derp narp. I was saying they should have hired people who were proven to develop fucking addons that the entire goddamn fucking community ended up needing as a basic fucking requirement to raiding since those people knew more about basic UI layout than any of the dick sucking titty milk stealing tranbos American Inventor dykes at Blizzard knew.

You didn't even have to hire these people the fans making artwork and addons for free simply contract it out pay them a pittance and steal their shit. Or hell since you are Blizzard and you own pretty much anything that goes through your fucking game simply steal the best ideas from the legion of simp retards out there making the shit and rip them the fuck off. Not like Blizzard is new to ripping off and stealing shit.

Goddamn when the work is fucking done for you why work hard when you can simply work smart.
 
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Masakari

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So I decided to level up a Frost Mage to enjoy the PVP against the flood of DKs coming with the pre-patch.
 
Neranja

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Tmac said:
I mean look at Furor. Dude was a raider Blizzard hired and Peter Principled to the top. Seems kind of baked into their philosophy. Raiders are not content creators, which is the point I was making. So, for Blizzard to hire famour raiders, but not famous addon builders is poignant.
Click to expand...
Except from what we have heard he did a pretty good job holding the overall direction together, e.g. Legion. Some of the stuff he did, e.g. the DK starting zone was pretty good storytelling, and was well received in its day.

Sorry, what was your argument again?

Tmac said:
Proving that people can build fun, functional, and desirable things is literally what the hiring process is supposed to reveal. If someone has already proven themselves capable of doing such a thing with an actual product, they are already way more qualified than someone who hasn't. All of your questions get answered at that point.
Click to expand...
No. Read my post again. It's one part of the process, but not all of it. If you have someone that built something amazing, but took six weeks for it when an average person would have needed two, then the that person is mostly useless and will rub all the other people the wrong way.

You have never worked in HR or something HR-related in a big company? You can't have a company full of "lone wolves" and nothing holding them together. In creative endeavors people have to work as team. If you have people that are good at their job but can't take criticism well, or people who rattle on about conspiracy theories on the company Slack and make everyone else uncomfortable, then productivity goes down and talented people leave.

Ironically, this also includes things like sexual harassment and cube crawling.

Tmac said:
I own a software company and have worked with both devs and designers (some of the best in the world) for the last several years in different capacities, so your tone is pretty ironic considering.
Click to expand...
And yet you haven't answered the question.

So, how big is your company and the teams working on your product? Because there are some inherent breaking points of company culture due to its size. One seems to be at around 20 people, which seems to be the limit where you can have daily interactions with each other, and communication seems to flow somewhat naturally, so that people automatically are "in sync". More people and they don't have daily interactions with each other, so you need to formalize communication and processes. Another point is at around 200 people.

This is one of the primary reasons why some people don't want to work in a big corporate setting, it dehumanizes communication into rigid hierarchies and processes.

Tmac said:
I wasn't suggesting Blizzard should've hired "fanbois". I was agreeing that Blizzard should've hired more people who built popular, fun, and functional products for their games.

I can't speak to Blizzard's current hiring process or who makes the "making things better" decisions. Alls I know is that Vanilla was a masterpiece and it was 10/10 because of the people there at the time.
Click to expand...
Then you have worded your argument wrong. But, lo and behold, Blizzard actually tried that. Remember when Blizzard promised that future expansions would be a yearly thing? That was 2006 by the way:
www.engadget.com

Blizzard planning new WoW expansions every year

Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, everyone's favorite frigidly named developer has revealed an intention to release more World of Warcraft expansions on a yearly basis. "Starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set - so every 12 months," says...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com

Blizzard actually tried to ramp up the WoW dev team multiple times to make content faster, but every time that failed. From some anecdotes of people that left the company, the moment they increased team size the development actually went slower, and people actually left organically. There seems to be something inherent to Blizzard company culture that is averse of restructuring and rethinking their process. From what we have heard, their company culture was centered around "who was here the longest."
 
Neranja

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BoozeCube said:
was saying they should have hired people who were proven to develop fucking addons that the entire goddamn fucking community ended up needing as a basic fucking requirement to raiding since those people knew more about basic UI layout than any of the dick sucking titty milk stealing tranbos American Inventor dykes at Blizzard knew.
Click to expand...
You mean like the original one-click Decursive addon, the one with automatic targeting? Or the AVR addon during WotLK? Oh hey, but Blizzard later actually embraced addons ideas and added things like the raid view (which is a bit like Grid) and Raider.io. Isn't that great?

What you seem to miss, is that Blizzard actually enabled an arms race between raid designers and addon developers. You need those raiding addons because encounter mechanics have ramped up expansion after expansion to counter increased player awareness to them due to addons like DBM, BigWigs and WeakAuras. Blizzard could've disable all those addons and streamline encounters, but instead they went into a dick measuring contest. Which was pretty obvious during the last World First Race on retail.

Interestingly, this is the only MMO on the market where that happened. So, let me ask you a honest question: Do you have fun being told by an addon to "Run away, little girl" on raid night?
 
Chris

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Neranja said:
Except from what we have heard he did a pretty good job holding the overall direction together, e.g. Legion. Some of the stuff he did, e.g. the DK starting zone was pretty good storytelling, and was well received in its day.

Sorry, what was your argument again?


No. Read my post again. It's one part of the process, but not all of it. If you have someone that built something amazing, but took six weeks for it when an average person would have needed two, then the that person is mostly useless and will rub all the other people the wrong way.

You have never worked in HR or something HR-related in a big company? You can't have a company full of "lone wolves" and nothing holding them together. In creative endeavors people have to work as team. If you have people that are good at their job but can't take criticism well, or people who rattle on about conspiracy theories on the company Slack and make everyone else uncomfortable, then productivity goes down and talented people leave.

Ironically, this also includes things like sexual harassment and cube crawling.


And yet you haven't answered the question.

So, how big is your company and the teams working on your product? Because there are some inherent breaking points of company culture due to its size. One seems to be at around 20 people, which seems to be the limit where you can have daily interactions with each other, and communication seems to flow somewhat naturally, so that people automatically are "in sync". More people and they don't have daily interactions with each other, so you need to formalize communication and processes. Another point is at around 200 people.

This is one of the primary reasons why some people don't want to work in a big corporate setting, it dehumanizes communication into rigid hierarchies and processes.


Then you have worded your argument wrong. But, lo and behold, Blizzard actually tried that. Remember when Blizzard promised that future expansions would be a yearly thing? That was 2006 by the way:
www.engadget.com

Blizzard planning new WoW expansions every year

Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, everyone's favorite frigidly named developer has revealed an intention to release more World of Warcraft expansions on a yearly basis. "Starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set - so every 12 months," says...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com

Blizzard actually tried to ramp up the WoW dev team multiple times to make content faster, but every time that failed. From some anecdotes of people that left the company, the moment they increased team size the development actually went slower, and people actually left organically. There seems to be something inherent to Blizzard company culture that is averse of restructuring and rethinking their process. From what we have heard, their company culture was centered around "who was here the longest."
Click to expand...
All this is still their fault though.

OK they tried and failed... they shouldn't have failed... a billion dollar company should be able to handle it.

The company was and is just badly managed from top to bottom.

They also lack talent of the level needed for a product like WoW, FF14 seems to have at least 3 genius level people working for them (Yoshi P, Soken, Ishikawa).
 
Daidraco

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Neranja said:
Blizzard actually tried to ramp up the WoW dev team multiple times to make content faster, but every time that failed. From some anecdotes of people that left the company, the moment they increased team size the development actually went slower, and people actually left organically. There seems to be something inherent to Blizzard company culture that is averse of restructuring and rethinking their process. From what we have heard, their company culture was centered around "who was here the longest."
Click to expand...
I never paid attention too, or never cared to look at stuff like that. Just seems like it would be a common "duh" moment for a company. More content = more player retention. My point though, is I wonder how much of the "struggle" came back to just the fact that multiple hands were trying to make changes to the content all at once? For example, Unreal 5 can let multiple people work on / save multiple projects at a time - so Im assuming WoW cant do that in its old ass engine. Because for as long as Ive played these games, Ive often thought "Well fuck, after a decade of making content - you would think they would be able to throw out a new zone every month or less!"
 
TJT

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BoozeCube said:
What some of you log jammers are missing is I wasn't like OMG Blizzard should hire fan bois derp narp. I was saying they should have hired people who were proven to develop fucking addons that the entire goddamn fucking community ended up needing as a basic fucking requirement to raiding since those people knew more about basic UI layout than any of the dick sucking titty milk stealing tranbos American Inventor dykes at Blizzard knew.

You didn't even have to hire these people the fans making artwork and addons for free simply contract it out pay them a pittance and steal their shit. Or hell since you are Blizzard and you own pretty much anything that goes through your fucking game simply steal the best ideas from the legion of simp retards out there making the shit and rip them the fuck off. Not like Blizzard is new to ripping off and stealing shit.

Goddamn when the work is fucking done for you why work hard when you can simply work smart.
Click to expand...
You say this, but they still had the A team at Blizzard when they let DOTA slip through their fingers.
 
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Tmac

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Neranja said:
Except from what we have heard he did a pretty good job holding the overall direction together, e.g. Legion. Some of the stuff he did, e.g. the DK starting zone was pretty good storytelling, and was well received in its day.

Sorry, what was your argument again?
Click to expand...

I'm agreeing with Booze that they should've hired more addon creators. They had success hiring former raiders, but seemed to neglect the broader community of content creators. I wasn't criticizing hiring former raiders.

Neranja said:
No. Read my post again. It's one part of the process, but not all of it. If you have someone that built something amazing, but took six weeks for it when an average person would have needed two, then the that person is mostly useless and will rub all the other people the wrong way.

You have never worked in HR or something HR-related in a big company? You can't have a company full of "lone wolves" and nothing holding them together. In creative endeavors people have to work as team. If you have people that are good at their job but can't take criticism well, or people who rattle on about conspiracy theories on the company Slack and make everyone else uncomfortable, then productivity goes down and talented people leave.

Ironically, this also includes things like sexual harassment and cube crawling.
Click to expand...

You're all over the place, lol. WTF are you even trying to say?

10/10 any business leader would want to hire someone with a successful product over someone who doesn't have one. All this conjecture of yours makes no sense at all. You even admit their hiring practices sucked. So... WTF are you arguing?

Neranja said:
So, how big is your company and the teams working on your product? Because there are some inherent breaking points of company culture due to its size. One seems to be at around 20 people, which seems to be the limit where you can have daily interactions with each other, and communication seems to flow somewhat naturally, so that people automatically are "in sync". More people and they don't have daily interactions with each other, so you need to formalize communication and processes. Another point is at around 200 people.
Click to expand...

We're not arguing how to scale a dev team to 200. Stop grasping at retarded straws and making new arguments.

Neranja said:
Then you have worded your argument wrong. But, lo and behold, Blizzard actually tried that. Remember when Blizzard promised that future expansions would be a yearly thing? That was 2006 by the way:
www.engadget.com

Blizzard planning new WoW expansions every year

Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, everyone's favorite frigidly named developer has revealed an intention to release more World of Warcraft expansions on a yearly basis. "Starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set - so every 12 months," says...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com

Blizzard actually tried to ramp up the WoW dev team multiple times to make content faster, but every time that failed. From some anecdotes of people that left the company, the moment they increased team size the development actually went slower, and people actually left organically. There seems to be something inherent to Blizzard company culture that is averse of restructuring and rethinking their process. From what we have heard, their company culture was centered around "who was here the longest."
Click to expand...

I never argued they should ramp up content. Are you getting my posts confused with other people? You're quoting me, but you're not even responding to what the quote says. I literally have one argument and you're all over the place trying to respond to it.

I think I'll move on.
 
Neranja

Neranja

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Tmac said:
I'm agreeing with Booze that they should've hired more addon creators. They had success hiring former raiders, but seemed to neglect the broader community of content creators. I wasn't criticizing hiring former raiders.
Click to expand...
Excuse me, but what exactly do you mean with the term "addon"? Strictly speaking, addon means the funny LUA scripts that operate the game UI. So what would hiring addon creators do? The fundamental problem Blizzard has with WoW development, when boiled down, is that they can't generate enough content in a timely manner. This is why Turtle WoW is such a success.

Also, as per my other posting: Addons are both a blessing and a curse. But addons can't change the core gameplay of the game. Sure, if the gameplay sucks you can put addons on it, but that's like putting a pig in a dress and putting lipstick on it. This is exactly what happened with retail. How would hiring addon creators do anything about this?

Tmac said:
You're all over the place, lol. WTF are you even trying to say?

10/10 any business leader would want to hire someone with a successful product over someone who doesn't have one. All this conjecture of yours makes no sense at all. You even admit their hiring practices sucked. So... WTF are you arguing?
Click to expand...
From your answer I can gather that you just focus on the end goal, which is having a successful product, while I on the other hand show the problems in the process when you hire slowpoke.jpg devs. Which wasn't that hard to understand, if you would re-read my posts without skimming them. Or do you need an ELI5 version of that?

Say, have you ever read "The Mythical Man-Month" or "Peopleware"?

Tmac said:
We're not arguing how to scale a dev team to 200. Stop grasping at retarded straws and making new arguments.
Click to expand...
Sorry to break it to you, but we are exactly doing that: The current WoW development team at Blizzard is rumored to be over 200 people already, and they added 100 more when they bought Proletariat, the developers of Spellbreak.

Why do you think I brought it up?

Tmac said:
I never argued they should ramp up content.
Click to expand...
So you think some magical addons will fix the game? Like you put new paint on an old car? You think THIS is the problem with WoW?
 
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Neranja

Neranja

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Daidraco said:
My point though, is I wonder how much of the "struggle" came back to just the fact that multiple hands were trying to make changes to the content all at once? For example, Unreal 5 can let multiple people work on / save multiple projects at a time - so Im assuming WoW cant do that in its old ass engine.
Click to expand...
The internal format of the WoW data has changed over the years, which is why they had a hard time importing the Vanilla data into a Legion-era client and make it work. Omar needed two weeks to make a proof of concept for that alone, so they probably have improved their tools. If they haven't, then that is probably a serious management fuckup, and not because the developers didn't want to do it.

From what you can read between the lines of the Shadowlands zones, it looks like their developers had to start creating zones without having a fixed overarching narrative to slot their zones in to, so many quests seem to be oddly generic hodge-podge, without a looming villain on the horizon. One blatant example is the Maldraxxus quest chain: "Thanks for discovering the traitor, saving us and opening up the Seat of the Primus. But you're not a Necrolord, so you can't come in. Fuck off."
 
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Big Phoenix

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TJT said:
You say this, but they still had the A team at Blizzard when they let DOTA slip through their fingers.
Click to expand...
Imagine letting an idea worth billions walk out your door.

Hell the only reason I bought wc3 was to play dota back in the day.
 
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Masakari

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Hey everybody!
Now that we’ve announced that Wrath of the Lich King Classic will release on September 26th, I want to give you an update on some of the items we’ve been collecting feedback on since our Beta began.

Raid Lockouts
We’ve decided that lockouts should be shared between Heroic and Normal versions of the raid, but NOT between 10/25-player versions of the raid. You’ll be able to do both the 10-player and 25-player version of each raid every lockout period but will have to choose between Normal and Heroic for the raids that offer that choice.

Our original concern was with players feeling “required” to do the same raid multiple times per week in order to “keep up,” but that came more from the original experience of Trial of the Crusader than from Naxxramas. Trial of the Crusader’s original release allowed you to run four different versions of the same content in a single week, all of which provided better loot than anything that had been previously available, which created enormous pressure to run all four versions in order to leapfrog over the Ulduar loot. Making the Normal and Heroic versions of Trial of the Crusader share a lockout does a lot to mitigate that, by cutting the number of weekly runs in half.

Additionally, players have pointed out that in many cases they want to be able to run the 25-player version of the raid with their guild, while pugging the 10-player version. Ultimately, that positive social aspect of having raids of various sizes available each week is compelling to us, and fits our goal of providing a vibrant social ecosystem, for friendships to form and develop in. You might, for example, find yourself pugging 10-player raids with a few of the same people from time to time, and end up inviting them to fill an empty slot on your main raid roster later. By contrast, if you could do both Normal and Heroic in the same week, you’d be incentivized to push your existing group to run them back-to-back, which isn’t the same sort of positive social experience.
This was recently bugged on the Wrath Classic Beta, and both 10/25-player version of Naxxramas appeared to share a lockout, but that was unintended and will be fixed before we launch.

Related to this, we also plan to make any trinkets with both Normal and Heroic versions (such as Death’s Verdict) share a Unique-Equip category, so that you can’t have both versions of the same trinket equipped at the same time. While it was originally possible to do this, it was never intended, and motivated us to create the Unique-Equipped categories back then. Prior to creating the Unique-Equipped categories, we could only prevent characters from wearing two copies of the exact same item.

Race and Faction Change
While it won’t be ready for our launch in September, we have changed our minds on this, and we’re working on adding the Race and Faction change as a paid service in a future patch.

Originally, we planned not to offer Race and Faction change at all, because it felt like it removed some of that fantasy feeling of having dramatically different physical attributes that affect your gameplay. We were also a little worried about players chasing the “flavor of the month” in terms of racial abilities However, we’re convinced by the argument that being able to play with your friends is more important, and that you should be able to bring your accomplishments with you when you do. This turns out to be the same tradeoff provided by transferring between realms, which is already available as a paid service, so it makes sense to make the same decision with respect to Race and Faction change.

In short, this fits our aim to nurture and protect social experiences, so we’ll work on it for an upcoming patch.

Character-Based Mounts and Achievements
As before, we plan to have mounts and achievements be per-character, rather than on the account.
This originally came up in response to our plan to not include Race and Faction change, as a suggested alternative way for players to preserve their accomplishments when re-rolling. Since we’ve been convinced to allow Race and Faction change in an upcoming patch, we’re going to focus our efforts on that, and preserve the original Lich King behavior of keeping mounts and achievement associated with the character that earned them.

LFG Tools
We continue to iterate on the bulletin-board style Looking for Group tool, and we do not have plans to add the Random Dungeon Finder.
For players, this has probably been the hottest topic of discussion since our announcement, and we welcome all the continuing feedback on how to improve the tool and make it better. I know this will be disappointing news for some, but we want to settle this topic before launch so everyone knows what to expect and can plan accordingly.

We remain hopeful that our recent anti-boosting changes, especially on Fresh Start realms, will invigorate the lower-level dungeons around launch. We also expect the LFG tool to help facilitate long-term friendship formation for players who are looking for it.

2v2 Arena Achievements and Titles
We’re going to award achievements and titles for the 2v2 Arena bracket, just like we did in Burning Crusade Classic.

Originally, Wrath of the Lich King dropped achievements and titles from the 2v2 Arena bracket, but due to popular demand, we’re going to preserve them in Wrath Classic. When we originally stopped awarding titles and achievements for 2v2s, it was because 2v2 was difficult to balance. Nowadays, rather than try to make all classes equally capable in all brackets, we want to preserve the existing class balance and celebrate the unique play style for the classes that perform well in each bracket.

We’ll always continue to listen to feedback on these and all topics. I hope this answers many lingering questions about what the state of things will be when we release.

Thanks, as always, for your interest and support!

What about name changes?
Name changes have been planned all along and will be available at launch.

Any ETA on Pre-patch? Or Fresh servers.
Fresh servers will launch with pre-patch, and we’ll have that date for you in a separate announcement along with other nearby dates for context.
The next couple of months are pretty busy, so we want the schedule to be as clear as possible.

I feel raid lockouts are being over thought. it was ONE raid that had 4 lockouts. ICC had dynamic difficulty and that’s fine, the raids before ToGC had only normal (and hard modes you activate there).
togc should have dynamic difficulty like ICC as opposed to still having 4 but being locked out of 2 of them
To clarify, Ulduar will work as it did originally. We’re not actually adding an additional Difficulty setting to Ulduar, only the hard-modes that it originally had. Since the hard modes are triggered by mechanics on the normal-mode bosses, they’re already part of the same lockout.
As you said, Trial of the Crusader was the only outlier, which is why we’re making a change there.

Is the LFG tool going to teleport us to the dungeon?
No, but once a couple of you arrive, you can use the meeting stone to summon appropriately leveled party members to join you.

ICC was always like this, only TotC is changing, if they implement in in the ICC way it’ll be fine (you can change per boss)
We’d like to let you change between normal/heroic per-boss in both ToC and ICC, but we’re not ready to commit to that yet. We’ll know more as ToC gets closer and we have more time to look at how its built, and how hard it would be to change.
All I’m confirming in this post is that you definitely won’t be able to do both difficulties in the same week, and that you definitely CAN do 10 and 25-player versions in the same week, since that was previously something we were considering doing differently.
 
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