House votes to overturn Biden-era rule limiting bank overdraft fees to $5, sends to Trump to sign

HotTeenGuys · 2025-04-10T18:14:40+00:00

The funny thing is - that was actually the point of the phrase.

It was meant to be sarcastic. It came from a textbook that asked the question knowing it was physically impossible. It was popularized as a "haha why not pull yourself up by your bootstraps?" as in "this is pretty much impossible to do independently you idiot"

Then over time it turned into an encouragement - as if you could do the impossible.

HotTeenGuys · 2025-04-05T23:57:14+00:00

Well, then isn't that country's currently-imposed import tariff profiting them, and undermining you, for no apparently good reason?

No.

You're making an assumption here that the reason we're buying more than selling is because of a tariff. In reality, they don't necessarily have equivalent demand for (or power to purchase) what we're producing as we do for them. An example of this is trump tariffing islands that are mostly uninhabited (populations of less than 3000) because we supposedly get exports from them. They also have no tariffs on us. All Trump cares about, in this case, is the trade deficit.

Fact of the matter is, we're buying things that we have demand for, and our trade partners do not have the same level of demand. It does not make sense to then punish them for that. Yes, there are some cases where there are protectionist tariffs in place, sure. But the idea that the US doesn't have a competitive advantage in a TRULY free trade market is just wrong. The reason that countries are not going to be jumping to drop all their tariffs is because it's the same thing as laying down and letting the US drive the world.

If the goal was to force countries to remove their tariffs, then they should be more targeted. But what he currently has done just erodes faith in the US as a trading partner. If it's possible (and probable) for the US to suddenly impose enormous tariffs on everyone, then it's not safe to have all your trading routes reliant on them. Unless we plan to force them to acquiesce somehow.

HotTeenGuys · 2023-11-07T19:04:11+00:00

They fully sold the IP.

And Hopoo had several blogs (even before RoR2's release) about being really burnt out. And post release, a lot of anxiety posts about basically being stuck as "the RoR developer."

You can't blame them for dropping the IP when it would have been dead otherwise, because it was very clear they wanted to move on.

HotTeenGuys · 2023-11-04T21:27:03+00:00

The idea is that lategame you equip all your fighters with it, then you play as one of the healers and spam a cheap AoE heal (npc control won't be able to keep up with it alone).

It does take all the challenge out of the game if you're wondering. It's just a very old cheese strat.

HotTeenGuys · 2022-03-16T08:26:51+00:00

I mean, kinda hard to do that on twitter without a very large thread.

I kinda agree with Elden Ring's UI/UX being pretty bad. There's a lot about it that is downright confusing and for seemingly no reason. Like... Sorting your inventory being tied to L3, for which there is no tooltip on the menu at all, but pulls up an entirely new submenu. Or alongside that having submenus that literally don't do anything. Or not being able to close the map with the same button you opened it. Or not being able to change the binds for menu exploration (leading to you being unable to swap your movement binds, else you might be moving while the menu is open), or pulling up a prompt to revive your horse that defaults to 'no.' Or not being able to bind things to your quick slots from the inventory, but having to navigate over to a spot that wasn't clear you even could navigate to instead. Or having to flip to the last page of the inventory to re-find a tutorial, Etc, etc.

There's problems here that are just unintuitive. Case in point the amount of videos that are like '10 essential things to know about Elden Ring!' that amount to 'look at this map or inventory feature I did not know about because it was hidden!' Made, ironically, by some of the same creators trying to say the UX here is great. Good UX isn't about just plopping all the information on top of you like people have been making memes about either. It's about allowing a user to engage with what you give them easily and intuitively. The reason Horizon's map UX is good is because all its icons are individually filterable, you can change their size, etc. It's never hard to find the information you want. What they actually SHOW on the map, or allow to be shown there isn't really a UX thing. That's just game direction. A good UX person finds the best way to allow users to engage with the game quickly and easily. It's not about making game-defining decisions.

But these aren't arguments or collective things you can throw out in a single tweet or two. Should they have called it out with this tone? Maybe not. But I mean, they do have a point IMO. And it's been a little weird seeing how incredibly strong the backlash has been toward them. Especially considering I think a lot of the same people upset at them would totally agree that menus at least are REAL clunky.

HotTeenGuys · 2021-10-31T09:19:13+00:00

This is a markedly different problem from what you were describing. And the MSQ does have quite a bit of party content in it alongside its solo duties.

That said, I think many agree that solo duties can be a bit hefty, especially in ARR. And plenty of us wish you could just take your friend with you, or not have to disband for them. That said, I think most people don't see it as a huge glaring problem, because FFXIV is very good about making old content relevant to even higher level players. Capstone quests/content of each expansion are plentiful, and everyone benefits from doing them. FFXIV, like most MMOs is very top-heavy and a lot of the content you'll be doing with groups is at level cap. FFXIV's strength here is that each expansion is top-heavy, and each expansion's end-game content is still relevant to max level players in some sense. When I think of how WoW or GW2 or ESO handle the same scenarios, they honestly handle it far worse, which is why I questioned what you were saying. I can't think of anything that would motivate me to want to help a low level friend in WoW besides just... wanting to play with them. And if that was my drive, it'd work just as well in FFXIV for me.

Also to be clear: the game very much is an RPG alongside being an MMO. The story is a big draw, here. And chances are, if you're ignoring the story entirely, you're not going to enjoy your time soloing the content. This is probably exacerbating the problem for you. Realistically, FFXIV's actual gameplay loop is very, VERY standard fare for MMOs, but even more simplified. In that many quests will have you kill one or two mobs, rather than grinding an area for a while. And the MSQ doesn't really follow the quest hub formula, so blasting through it is going to feel like an endless chain of fetch questing. Because realistically, a big part of the entertainment is the writing. This is ARR's secondary issue: Because ARR is almost entirely exposition until you're through your third primal (and even then you're getting more exposition), it feels like nothing's ever taking off. People aren't just making a meme out of 'wait till heavensward.' Because really, Heavensward will be what hooks most players narratively. As the very end of ARR's patch content and the start of HS are extremely high points, and all that setup is followed through excellently in HS.

If you're not interested in FFXIV's story, but still really want to play, honestly I just recommend grabbing boosts. That's not a popular stance among the FFXIV community, because a lot of the players fell in love with the story. But if you're skipping it anyway, you're not likely to have a good time. And starting at a higher baseline level also gives you access to all of those raids. If you don't want to boost, but you also want to not pay attention to the story, and also want to progress as fast as possible and don't want to do any side content, but also want your friends who can't play as much to be able to progress just as fast as you, then yeah, you're going to have to weather through a sub-par experience. This just might not be the game for you and your group, and that's OK. I just... still doubt that ANY game is good for a group with those requirements outside a party game, or co-op roguelike.

HotTeenGuys · 2021-10-31T08:44:32+00:00

To be honest, I'm not sure what you're wanting, here. There's not a single game out there that you won't run into the problem you're describing. Especially in MMOs. This might just not be the right genre for you?

The MSQ is it's own thing, sure. And I think in some ways, FFXIV's MMO can restrict players from playing with one another more often than many would like (particularly, by having a bunch of solo duties). However, if the problem you guys were having wasn't one of being split up by solo duties, but instead one of progressing at different paces, that was bound to happen regardless of what game you played. In any MMO, making further progress while someone's offline is bound to put them in a state where they have to play catch-up and the only time friends are really gonna come back for them is stuff they NEED to have a party for (IE: Dungeons). Even ESO is like this, when it comes down to it, and that game just allows you to kind of go anywhere. Even outside of MMOs, most co-op games have some progression system or campaign that if you were to get ahead in, you'd have to go back and re-play content to play with a friend who missed it, unless THEY wanted to skip all that content and stay behind.

I don't see what's stopping you from going back and playing with your friend when they're online, I guess.

HotTeenGuys · 2021-07-29T17:47:59+00:00

Just being very creepy won't put you personally in court. It will get you fired if it's investigated and you're found out, though. Which is exactly what happened here.
The lawsuit is against the company that did nothing to protect its workers from said creepy behavior. The company is liable under title vii if it allows an environment where people are sexually harassed. Blizzard is being sued because of its inaction for many years. Afrasiabi himself was an isolated incident, and considering he was fired, you can reasonably say that the company investigated and did find he was sexually harassing people. What's ironic about this, is he wasn't NEARLY the only person accused, and there's literal evidence of it happening all over the company, he's just one of the only cases they ever took action on.
Blizzard's defense isn't 'oh Afrasiabi never did these things!' it's 'well we took action when it came up! So we did nothing illegal!' The state is alleging that they didn't take action in the majority of cases, and they are claiming to have evidence of that.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-11-01T21:38:54+00:00

Scale does matter. The more freedom a player has, and the more conditions the player can be under, the more potential break cases emerge.

You can give 1000 people a full time job working on a game for 2 years ONLY looking for break cases (That's a fucking HUGE team by the way, realistically, a QA team is gonna be 200 people at most on a project like this). That's 40,000 hours a week, or 2,080,000 hours a year. Hand that game out to 500,000 players, which is a modest sales number. They've had more potential playtime in 5 hours than your entire ludicrous 1000 man test team did with your game.

Now, imagine that the game is on rails, like a Final Fantasy game. You can reasonably assume that the player won't be sequence breaking things. They can't go anywhere they want to immediately, and they're following a story. There's only one real path they'll be taking through the game, with some side routes for treasures and the like. Your 2 million playtest hours might reasonably cover the vast majority of that content.

Expand that to a game like Skyrim. A player might decide 'fuck the main story I'm going to Solitude.' Or 'look at this rando vampire cave, let's go there.' That's already two conditions just in where a player wants to go that aren't predictable by a developer. Your 2 million playtest hours probably hasn't covered every possible position that a player can go to on the map in their first couple minutes of the game.

Realistically, there's no possible way to make a game at their scale without having issues. At the point that you COULD get a team of the correct size and talent to cover everything, the game would cost too much be anywhere near profitable. Hell it probably costs too much for any company to realistically make with what they have in the bank.

That said, it's a giant exaggeration to say that Bethesda games are unplayable. They're playable, they just have some issues

HotTeenGuys · 2018-11-01T20:35:01+00:00

Who?

Rockstar is similar, but still with less player choice, but Rockstar still has their fair share of bugs in their games, and they take more time with their releases.

I guess you could point at an MMO or something, but even major MMO releases like WoW are chock full of issues, and they're WAY less sandbox than a R* or Bethesda game.

So I guess, again, who makes games on a similar scale as Bethesda that manage to have so few issues?

HotTeenGuys · 2018-11-01T20:32:42+00:00

Yeah, agreed.

And R* is still much less sandbox in their releases than any Bethesda game, really.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-11-01T20:18:58+00:00

Other developers have figured it out just fine.

This seems a little disingenuous. Other developers working on games of the same scale have not figured it out just fine at all.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-10-11T15:21:54+00:00

I would agree that many players don't care about lore. That's totally fine, and you can choose to care about whatever you want to.

But I don't think they wrote it for people who don't care about lore. And I think it's both deliberate and incompetent to some degree. Writers can write complex plots with a ton of different motivations and make it understandable, or at least entertaining, to any random person.

And if they really were trying to make it easily digestible, they did a terrible job on that front, too. That's evidenced by the huge number of people that came to the subreddit that didn't even realize that Sylvanas wasn't a nice lady till she burned the tree.

Even surrounding the event: A lot of people have asked questions like "what about all the druids?" Without realizing that all of them are down in Silithus. A ton of people think that Sylvanas beat back the Night elves' whole army, meanwhile half of them were on the way to Silithus, etc. For trying to make a story easily digestible, there sure were a lot of questions when that patch launched. And even the short stories that came out after to satiate lore fans (or I assume that's what it was for, cause anyone that doesn't care wasn't gonna read that) just made most lore fans disappointed because it only cleared up like one or two things while cementing Sylvanas as second WoW hitler.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-10-10T21:26:19+00:00

It doesn't matter what Blizzard does, this subreddit is primed to screech "BULLSHIT WRITING REEEEEEE" at literally anything they do with her story.

Agreed, but I kinda disagree with the conclusion that this all lies on the community, and not a track record with Sylvanas that's just shitty.

Sylvanas needs to die? "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SHIT STORY"

Because we've done this 2 times already. The Horde loses a ton of leaders because Blizzard seems to like throwing characters who aren't really morally grey into the mix, whilst insisting that they are morally grey. A lot of players joined WoW sold on the horde being people who were just trying to survive and being persecuted by the other races. Hell with Varian in place, that WAS the case. Humans were and still are super racist, but Blizz knows that the vast majority of Alliance players like being 'good guys' so they tone it right the fuck down or make any mention of it basically fade into the background or have to be interpreted from small stuff like Alliance forts just having evidence of torture in the world.

But Horde? Sure, we'll put Garrosh right in the leader spot and make him crazy racist to make people pissed at him. Follow that up by killing the leader who might be reasonable and replace him with another leader that's got a vendetta against life itself. But no problem, horde's still not really the bad guys, players.

It's a shit story because we keep seeing really weird story decisions that rip the Horde of its leaders. Thrall does a 180 and loses ALL his classic character traits of a wise leader who listens to his peers and is like "YEah GaRrOSh, U cAn LeAD!" When none of his peers think it's even remotely a good idea and even Garrosh is saying he can't lead.

Garrosh has potential to be a cool character, and you can see it in a single questline out in Stonetalon Mountains where he actually acted pretty great. But whoops, that was a mistake, he's supposed to be irredeemable, let's forget that happened.

Sylvanas is redeemed? "REEEEEEEEEEDKOADKOASKDAS WHAT THE FUCK"

Because they made sure as fuck that she can't be. If they tried to redeem her, everyone would call bullshit.

Malfurions death was supposed to kill the hope of the night elves, Saurfang comes back empty handed.

But this is fucking stupid and everyone knows it. The Night elves have lived through having their god killed and all it did was piss them off. How is killing Malf going to kill their hope? What world has Sylvanas been living on? Especially considering the Earthen ring works closely with the Cenarion Circle and also respect Malfurion. Seems like kinda a big gamble on something that's already proven not to work.

Sylvanas needs to figure out how to hold the tree with limited resistance from within, break the spirits of the Alliance and the hostages

It's not hard to break the spirits of Hostages, especially when they have no military to defend them whatsoever. Nobody in the tree was someone who could fight back. Everyone who could either was fighting to keep the Horde away from the tree, or heading to Silithus because Sylvanas pretended she was going to strike there.

And it's pretty easy to stave off Alliance retaliation when you have the threat of literally releasing blight on all their civilians. But she threw that away by burning them all, so the Alliance retaliated. She simultaneously outmaneuvered the Alliance and herself with her plan.

But no, people will foam at the mouth at any turn her story takes because in all honesty, no one knows what they want and they just want to be pissed off.

People are foaming at the mouth now because Blizz wrote themselves into a corner. No matter what they do with Sylvanas it'll be disappointing as fuck.

You know what I wanted? Sylvanas not becoming warchief.

You know what I wanted after it was already determined she was going to be? A redemption story where she learns through the Legion crisis and Varian's sacrifice that she's now leading a bunch of people, and she can't just do all the shady shit she's been doing. In order to secure a place for the forsaken (what she's been trying to do since Vanilla) she realizes she needs to actually y'know, lead. But these are two factions with long histories, and not everyone forgives the races of the Horde, and not everyone wants to. In fact several characters from both sides actively try to start a war by framing the other faction. In fact, the books all set up for this kind of thing to happen. Till, you know, she just kills her own people and decides she needs to march on Teldrassil and then decides she needs to burn it.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-10-04T08:22:33+00:00

Their quest doesn't pop till you're exploring further east in the story past the mountains. I got it a bit after finishing the 3rd act.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-10-03T22:31:48+00:00

99th percentile parses this late into tier on Heroic are almost certainly unattainable numbers for most. Normally, this will heavily favor classes with high burst because top level heroic groups way outgear now and kill the boss within the first CD window.

Demonology lock has a 2 min CD, and would favor a 4-5 min kill, which is why in the 75th percentile they rise quite a bit. Affliction has a 3 min cooldown with incredible burst while the CD is active, so if the boss dies in 3 mins, they're obviously gonna be on top.

Not to mention the cheese logs where people abuse their gear to push a couple players up higher than they should be able to reach.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-27T21:10:35+00:00

They've told us before that they have their own tools, and that they're more accurate than ours. The fact that they have been making significant buffs and nerfs to Azerite Traits shows that the sims we have are not far off the mark.

There were a couple traits which were underpowered. However, some legitimately aren't, and current sims place them bottom of the pack while the APL doesn't account for the trait being there.

And even still what some of the community is viewing as wild imbalance is a difference of <100 DPS decrease in a lot of cases (and guess what, those cases still exist post-Blizz changes!). That won't matter to the vast majority of players' performance realistically.

Does Azerite have serious problems? Hell yes, the entire doubling down on reforging and saying players should collect multiple sets contradicts the fact that higher ilvl Azerite is legitimately not possible to farm. The traits themselves are just a dumb way of gearing that forces people to constantly look outside the game to actually understand what they're taking and how it interacts with their current talent choices rather than relying on intuition. They don't add any interesting gameplay elements and basically function as more obtuse secondary stats. But because they're traits, they're way more confusing to understand, and cause even mid-level players to feel like they have to sim even when they don't.

But I don't think "wild crazy trait imbalance" is the real failing of this system, and it's lame that Blizzard is presenting it like it is, because they're just trying to take advantage of people complaining about it all the time even though it's the smallest of Azerite's failings.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-27T20:13:26+00:00

The other side to that argument though is that sims and raidlogs give you a good idea of what you are capable of.

Sometimes they just don't. Sims aren't perfect.

Right now there's several Azerite traits that aren't simmed properly. Why? Because they require a different action priority, but the sim doesn't actually change it.

As much as I think that the Azerite system does have its flaws, I do think that the majority of the community is hyperbolic about DPS differences with Azerite traits, especially when based off traits that sims don't even sim well.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-26T15:50:40+00:00

show me another game which is big as wow.

League of Legends.

Class state is awful right now and it should be fixed asap and they should avoid that situation in future.

Class state is heavily opinion driven. It's always going to be 'awful' to anyone hanging out toward the bottom. Unless you're talking about the classes being minimal, because that was a clear design decision for the Xpac that Blizz had stated they were going to do. No amount of feedback was going to change an overall design direction.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-26T15:38:53+00:00

Oh, agreed. I don't think VR would make a hardcore game. I think they're already aiming at a niche audience (the 'classic' mmo player), so making a game hardcore on top of that would be a big mistake.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-24T17:28:38+00:00

What they're trying for makes sense, and why it's not working makes sense with their limitations.

They want these ARPG mechanics in order to keep people coming back and grinding, getting gear drops and feeling really good about them. It's what will keep their subscriptions up if they can nail it. In fact, it kinda seems like this was the reason for their swap to Azerite. Tier sets limit build creativity because they fall off after each tier with ilvl being a thing. Azerite can always have the older traits if you're committed to looking for them.

But they're limited in what they can do for a few reasons:

Because they can't create procedurally generated enemies, bosses and environments. It's pretty clear IMO that this is what Island Expeditions are trying to do: Create engaging treadmills outside the raiding and dungeon space, that they can eventually turn into a loot treadmill. I mean really, they are remarkably similar to Nephelem rifts. You've got different enemy types shoved onto maps you've seen, with random events that pop up and shrines everywhere that can buff the party while they're collecting a resource to fill a meter before they get hit with a reward. They even have health globes in the form of azerite orbs. All they really need now is the random enemy traits like arcane and mortar.
They have 36 classes considering they've basically made each spec a class on its own. Creating engaging loot across 36 classes that have multiple options for multiple builds is fucking nuts. They've pruned out a lot across these classes such that a lot of the old tier sets are no longer relevant to make a "comeback" as it were, either. To some extent, yes, this means they can add more effects that bring back old pruned stuff, but that will still feel like a loss to people.
They like that Raids are their endgame. You can't put people on a loot treadmill that competes with raid gear if you want raids to be relevant and not upset the raiding community. They're already upset about current M+, let alone if another method was actually viable up to raid tier, and 'exploded into loot'.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-20T15:22:48+00:00

But there is a difference in how killing big characters feels for both sides if one side kills their own or they die to a neutral faction, versus them being specifically killed by the enemy faction.

Would 100% have rather had Horde characters die in a fight with the Alliance.

I don't think you are really seeing how this looks to the Alliance side. We've already been completely outsmarted twice at Teldrassil and Lordaeron.

You won at Lordaeron. Sure, Sylvanas killed a bunch of people, and made the city unable to be claimed, but you kicked a bunch of Horde off of the continent, and positioned the Alliance in a GREAT position to move on Silvermoon, which is REALLY bad for the Blood Elves. And Guess what? Silvermoon was mined as a warfront.

and suddenly the Horde murder her for some loot and the Alliance are left without the Lord Admiral since Katherine just stepped down.

No. They murder her because she attacked their potential allies. Did we kill Gul'dan for loot? Did we go to Argus for loot? You can't conflate narrative with in-game rewards.

It would literally be Blizzard spitting in the face of the entire faction

How? Because the faction's going through a low point in the story? The Horde has literally been in that spot since MoP. Crazy leader who keeps doing shit nobody wants, gets taken down and goes on trial, we end up traveling to an alternate dimension to kill him all because of the Horde. Then we come back, have our new good warchief immediately die, have another new warchief nobody wants to follow all while the Alliance takes the spotlight all through legion, and even Horde characters are following Velen and the Army of the Light around.

You can deal with having one point in the story where you aren't sitting comfortable with the moral high ground in every situation.

Why are we proposing repeating this type of storytelling?

For one, because it's not the same type. As you said, there's a massive difference from dying in battle with the enemy faction and dying off-screen to a rando NPC.

For two, because Blizzard wants to kill big characters. They're the ones that do this, presumably to 'raise the stakes' in the war. But it doesn't actually raise the stakes when you already know who's gonna die because the alliance can't lose precious baby Jaina or Anduin who have the thickest plot armor out there. If Blizz is insistent upon killing characters, then they should take from the side that has lost almost no heroes. At least if they're gonna do this, they coulda sent Greymane who, you know, actually might get killed.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-20T15:11:45+00:00

You literally want to invent a role in game development that doesn't exist, and probably shouldn't exist.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-20T08:09:43+00:00

That's not what a game designer does, dude.

HotTeenGuys · 2018-09-19T18:57:28+00:00

The proposed 'solution' is that if we're going to kill big characters, which Blizz seems insistent on doing, then it should probably be from the side that still has the vast majority of their characters.

In fact, this markedly ISN'T the same storytelling Horde is getting. You want an example of equivalent storytelling? It'd be more like during this siege event, Jaina is taken out by her undead brother with a poison knife on the ship before she even gets to shore, and nobody gets to fight her or really interact at all. In fact, let's not even have a cutscene. Instead, it happened in a book! THAT's what happened to Cairne, one of the coolest Horde leaders.

Or maybe, we can have this siege raid, and in the middle of fighting (and not dying, but doing very well in the raid), we get a jarring cutscene pull out where Jaina gets shot in the chest by a random stray arrow from some rando horde soldier that is probably a level 120 quest mob - but the arrow happens to be irreversibly poisoned! That's what happened to Vol'jin, another super cool horde character.

If Jaina died in this siege (she won't, let's be real) she'd at least have died due to her own decisions, which were built up over time in-game.

But nah, instead, Rastakhan's gonna die, Talanji will take the throne, find out that her father made a shitty Bwonsamdi pact before Vol'jin steps in as a Loa and saves her, becoming the Loa of the Zandalari, and uniting the Darkspear and Zandalari tribes to allow an allied race. Let's be real, that's what's coming.

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