Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
-Valve didn’t kill ownership it was already dead. DLC has been pulled, and games delisted, as well as games made unplayable by server shutdowns. They just happened to be the platform who told you to your face what you were getting into while everyone else lied and said the game was yours until it wasn’t. They also say they’ll provide downloads for a time if they ever shut down, but if you want that long term guarantee you’re probably better off looking at GOG and some kind of data storage for the installers.
-Origin is shit and I hate EA/Origin exclusives too, but it’s basically a launcher for their own games which I understand, but still prefer steam to be included too, so much of the time I avoid EA games (i avoid them for a lot of reasons tbh)
-Battle.net started as a unified launcher for blizzard games, which sort of made sense as they never worked with or were involved with steam, and many of their games were disc based or had its own installer. Subscriptions specifically I don’t think existed with steam for a while so that was sort of a complicating factor. Still wish their games were on steam, but it sort of made sense at its inception.
-I don’t even use the microsoft store unless forced to, I find it annoying and bleh. They’re forcing more games to it and it’s shitty too.
-Epic is annoying, but it’s a special kind of annoying because for many games early on, they would announce steam as a supported platform, some even sold the game on steam, until they changed to Epic exclusives. I think Fall Guys was one example. The bait and switch really lost them trust with a lot of gamers and you’ll find the attitude towards them can be pretty bad because of that history.
Add in that many of the games aren’t published by them, they just threw money at the publisher or devs to make their games epic exclusive. This can be good for developers, like an upfront investment, but sucks for gamers who like to keep things somewhat unified in terms of a game library. Especially when you already have to deal with 5 other launchers, another arbitrary one is pretty annoying.
If you’re wondering why people want their games on steam, look at the features. Free cloud save backups, a decent amount of free screenshot backups, in game recording is new and pretty neat, achievements, community marketplaces, frequent sales, family sharing, steam workshop for easy integrated modding, discussions and guides for all your games, early access games, built in friends, text chat, voice chat, remote play together, game streaming, etc.
TLDR: It isn’t an “oh epic stinky just because” situation. The Epic game store simply doesn’t have feature parity, bait and switched gamers multiple times with exclusives after games were advertised as being on steam, and basically survived on throwing money at devs to put their games exclusively on EGS, at the expense of the people who want to play those games on their chosen platform. Doesn’t shock me that they don’t have a lot of positive PR in the community.
“Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed”. As reported by Polygon, that’s an argument put forth by a new lawsuit...
With games people used to setup their own servers. (And we liked it that way. Way more sense of a community.) So that could be an option. Allow people to run their own servers again.
World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the...
This is extremely dependent on which games you’re playing and how you’re playing them. Public servers or matchmaking seem to generally be pretty bad for making connections, because they tend not to require as much social interaction and when they do it’s of the throw-away variety. Raiding and PVP in MMOs, when it’s difficult enough, tends to lead to greater connection-building because you want to actually be able to rely on your teammates. For me, though, the greatest games for building community tend to be sandbox games on private RP servers.
The roleplaying community for any given game tends to be substantially smaller than the community at large. It’s a fairly small pool where you see the same people over and over again. There are new faces too, but you’ll usually recognize folks if you’ve been around for a few years. If I check out a new DayZ server or a new Conan server, I will invariably run into people I’ve met time and time again. These communities have a shared history spanning years and dozens of servers, and they tend to bubble out into hundreds of small discord servers for in-game groups and general friend groups that form. Roleplay is all about communication, so you don’t really have that same distance that you do when the game is just about playing out a game loop over and over again. To play the game is to make friends, whether your characters are allied or are enemies.
There’s toxicity, to be sure, and private servers introduce a whole new layer of drama with nepotism and staff abuse, but those problems actually have solutions other than turning off chat or hoping the developers do something. Most servers have some form of whitelisting process and will actively ban problem users, or may even have some form of mediation process. If you don’t like how a server is run, you can get together a group of friends, rent a VPS or a dedi, and host a new server yourselves. It happens over and over again. Arguably most new RP servers come about because somebody didn’t like something about some previous RP server they were playing on. This leads not just to new servers, but to people developing new skill sets. It gives people a reason to develop new social and leadership skills, to expand their artistic abilities, and to develop new technical prowess. I know quite a few people, myself included, who got back into making art or got into modding, hosting, or development because they wanted to make something different for the community; to show people how things could be.
For me, roleplay has been life-transforming. It’s helped me work my way through a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see up close as easily if I were only seeing it through the context of my own real life. It’s given me artistic drive that I didn’t have before. And perhaps most vitally, it’s gotten me invested in community and led to meaningful friendships in a time where I haven’t really been super enthusiastic about getting out of the house in my free time. In an era where people are increasingly atomized, I’ve found it to be a great way to meet people that I care about.
It honestly blows my World of Warcraft raiding and PVP days completely out of the water. If you’re looking for community in video games, I definitely recommend getting invested in some RP. Immerse yourself and get wrapped up in some stories. Join some groups; make some friends. It’s a lot more interesting than toxic public lobbies full of people who don’t care about one another or any sense of community.
I think it’s community (and lack thereof). When you had to talk to others on your server only, sit in LFG and shout in Ironforge for a UBRS group, then all schlep to Blackrock Mountain, then spend an hour battling through the instance, that was a shared experience with players you’d see more or less often. Now, it’s get in a random queue, get teleported there, race behind some tank who can solo the whole thing, then everyone drops at the end before you can even say thanks.
And back when we had community hosted servers, evading a ban was so simple, change server or restart your dial-up connection to get a new IP and change nickname, yet it was incentive enough to behave, because people recognized you just through your text (voice chat was usually limited to clan games)
I think the guy is smart, and I used to hold his opinion in very high regard. But after he shat his opinion out and just doubled down and refusing to talk with Ross after calling him and his movement “scummy” I lost alot of respect for him. The dude can make 2 whole videos shitting on Ross and the movement but won’t talk to him about it? fuck off. Every time I watch a video of his he just sounds so pretentious to me now. And for someone that shines his “20 years of gamedev” purple heart badge every 15 mins, he acts willfully ignorant to the years of people self hosting reverse engineered WOW servers acting like its impossible for the community to keep these games preserved.
Imma break down their points and provide my own counter-arguments:
Client-Server model games can’t be client only because people could cheat
The publisher can provide the executable for the server portion of the client-server game at no cost to them.
The Crew was online only and had been running for 10 years, for it to continue running would cost Ubisoft more money and squeals provide the same experience with continued support
The publisher can provide the executable for the server portion of the client-server game at no cost to them.
Excessive red-tape / Government overreach
I like my government regulating massive corporations who exist in one of the largest industries, the move fast and break things mentality is detrimental to our society.
You bought a licence to the game not the game itself
That’s fucked up and shouldn’t happen. Why you ‘buy’ something, be it a game, movie, software, car, house. You should have the freedom to do whatever you want with it.
The initiative would damage live service games which provide value outside of just the game (online friendships).
Live service games can still do this under the initiative. Publishers might make less live service games but that’s their problem, not the consumers.
In the comments he adds counter-arguments to why publishers shouldn’t provide the server executable. Focusing on how monetisation would work:
If we don’t allow monetization - Who would be the party that enforces non-monetization of that server? If it’s the government I feel like we’re making an insane amount of red tape. If it’s the original company then this doesn’t work if they shut down.
If the company shuts down then it’s no longer an issue because no-one is losing money from the game servers now being monetised.
If we don’t allow monetization - Who is going to pay for the hosting if the servers cannot be monetized? If they cannot be monetized then these servers will also eventually shut down due to cost. We don’t up preserving games like this we just shift their death down the road.
The community, there are entire operating systems that are provided by volunteers for free with no advertisements. Providing the server executable does not shift their death down the road as anyone can run it going forward.
If we do allow monetization - This leads to a really weird attack potential if people can monetize the servers. You make an awesome game that has a small community. I want to monetize that game and run my own servers. I create a shitload of bots and constant exploits to erode the game and your business. Your business closes and you now have to give out server binaries to keep the game in a playable state. I can now profit off your work via private servers. This isn’t unlikely as we’ve seen mass attacks such as with TF2 We actually see echoes of this in the mobile market already as well. The only defense right now is DMCA or other takedown measures. Devs legitimately have very little protections as-is and this would erode that further. This creates an incentive for abuse where the abuser is protected as they are within their legal right to operate said “abandoned” games servers.
An odd straw-man, as for a small studio to develop a free to play, live service game to then have their game targeted by nefarious actors using a denial of service attack will only happed if the game is popular / good, in which case the developers should be making enough money to invest in protections against said actors, e.g. the IPs can be tracked and forwarded to the relevant authorities as orchestrating a denial of service attack is a crime.
That scenario isn’t anything like the TF2 situation, whose bots are ran by frustrated community members in an effort to have Valve continue updating TF2. Private servers can also be ran for TF2 as I write this, and the game is still being ran by Valve.
The only defence isn’t takedown measures, since the developer is running the game, as Thor said in the video, the developer can ban the bots.
It gives space to do servers based on specific interests if you want. I’m part of a game development server, and my “Local” tab has people on my server often talking about, and showing, things that are related to game development. And I can still follow anyone from any other Mastodon server too.
If you’re into video games, film, maybe a specific genre of music, you can have an instance dedicated to that. (It might already exist.) It’s like a virtual neighborhood, or forum. Remember forums? Those were nice. They cultivated a sense of community which made people a little more responsible in their attitudes, it feels like. Maybe that’s just nostalgia, but I like the server I’m on. It’s got friendly people I can talk to without feeling the need to fill my follows with them.
I never tried it. My only contact with the fediverse was through Lemmy.
When I became aware of lemmy it was first through the piracy subreddit doing the exodus and the head mod db0 mentioning the new piracy community. I wasnt aware of instances at the time and signed up on lemmy.ml because that was the first thing that popped up.
Later I realized I didnt want to be a part of ml and switched to my current instance.
Same goes for matrix. Signed up on element and now I dunno if I wanna stay there or leave. No special reason to do either.
Last time I heard about Mastodon it also doesnt inform about instances.
First google on mastodon leads me to mastodon.social.
A few links later (Info about an animal called mastodon, mastodon.social, google news widget, google info page widget and a “people also ask” section) I get to the joinmastodon.org page and first leads me to mastodon.social and a server selector.
My grandmother would be overwhelmed, my mother would ask me if the site is safe (I warned her to be wary about domains switching) and I assume other more tech iliterate would be just joining mastodon.social totally defeating the use case of deferedation.
I am thinking before 1.19.1 when chat reporting was added. 1.7 to 1.12 seem to have less requirements to run for lower end pcs. Its just some chill fun and not pvp focused so being newer than 1.9 shouldn’t matter. I am thinking 1.15 maybe since it added bees. I guess its a compromise between how well the game runs on lower...
I discovered this one recently. As the name implies, it’s a reverse-engineered clone of early versions of the game. It has extremely low hardware requirements, which allow the client to run on virtually anything.
Sony is facing a $7.9 billion lawsuit that could impact over 9 million players. They’ve been accused of deleting purchased movies, TV shows, and games—items customers thought they owned forever....
Thankfully modders have made good progress of coming closer to emulating servers for it so people can play it offline.
Bad part is Ubisoft actually removed The Crew from some people’s Ubisoft account. Steam versions were safe ironically to be able to download the game to make use of it when Crew community made fix is out.
Personally ive almost never enjoyed gaming alone. I can count the singleplayer games ive finished on one hand. I almost exclusively enjoy playing games with friends. CO-OP, PVE, PVP, you name it. As long as i can play with friends and we can progress together im happy. Long term progression is my favorite, really seeing something grow that youve all done together is great. I enjoy MMO RPGs but also games like Minecraft, Factorio or Satisfactory.
As others have already mentioned breaking the pattern is the cure to boredom. Maybe try something new? Look for a genre youve nerver played or bringa some friends onto a Minecraft server. Maybe join a community and find some people to play with if no friends are interested. Or just take a break. Sometimes we ned to leave the cycle for a bit to be able to enjoy it.
I doing think it was an one thing, but more-so a build-up over time - a death of a thousand cuts, if you will:
It was a cultural moment generally, just think back to all of those celebrity commercials (“I’m Mr. T and I’m a Night Elf Mohawk”). All cultural moments pass eventually.
The third expansion (Cataclysm) was quite weak to begin with; coupled with a lack of content in the tail-end of the second (Wrath of the Lich King), which itself was incredible - narratively wrapped up the story that began all the way back in Warcraft 3.
So a lot of people chose that time to bow out of the game, as it required a fair bit of time dedication and seemed like an appropriate time to do so - given the narrative pay-off.
Lastly, the introduction of a number of game tools to automate the group composition process meant that the impact of player reputation on servers was severely diminished. Before then, there players who were toxic (stealing items, intentionally killing the group, failing quests) were infamous on a server.
Once this tool was further opened up to allow for groups to form across multiple servers - the sense of community was shattered as you would have no way to know if the person from another server was good/bad etc. it stopped being about bringing in the individual player, and just getting a body in to fill a role.
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
Probably depends on the game. I’m pretty sure more popular games or games with a sizable amount of dedicated fans, like the TF2 community, have probably already found a way to make their own private servers or at least are working on it.
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
If you don’t retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like “buy” or “purchase” on the store page button. I hope there aren’t huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there’s no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not...
Well, sort of. HDCP exists, and does make it harder to capture an AV stream.
For interactive content, the current push online components hosted on external servers adds a lot of complexity. While a lot of that stuff can be patched around by a very dedicated community, not every piece of content gets enough community appeal to attract the wizards to do such a thing.
And while anyone can digivolve into a wizard given enough commitment and effort, the onramp is not easy these days. Wayyy back when cracking a game meant opening the file and finding the line for 'if cd_key == ‘whru686’, it was much easier to get casually involved. Nowadays, DRM has gotten so much more sophisticated that a tech background is essentially required to start.
This is a shining example proving that games don’t need to die. Especially if you’re a company that is completely uninterested in pursuing an IP any further. When I read that they were going to post the server tools and a new client on itch I was over the moon.
Proletariat took the best approach possible with Spellbreak, whereas iron galaxy… Fuck them. The community was actively trying to reverse engineer Rumbleverse to get it running again and they shut it down. They also seem completely uninterested in bringing Rumbleverse back. (Thankfully there are still ways to self host it, it’s just not as clean as it could have been).
Whenever you hear someone say it would take too much effort to give the community tools, point them to Spellbreak. Hell It would be commendable even if the company didn’t give communities tools but didn’t actively shut down any revival projects.
Games are art and I’m sure plenty of devs that worked on these live service games would have loved to keep working on them, but their employer told them to stop. I’m sure there are plenty of devs that would love to see their game continue to live on, but their voice doesn’t matter because they aren’t the decision makers. So much time and manpower just thrown out the window.
Proletariat, thank you. You are one of the good ones.
I have been getting into emulation though there is no emulation community here to talk about it. I assume emulation discussion in gaming is welcome any thoughts?
I love Emulation since it can be on completely different ends of the spectrum. On the one hand you have ROM collections on modern system, like Capcom Arcade Stadium, or TMNT Cowabunga Collection.
On another you have complete reverse engineering project like PCSX-Reloaded, and community developed emulators with retail games are based on, all open sourced and technically legal, so long as you have the hardware, and tools to back the ROMs, BIOS’s, and other material required.
Then you have the complete black market, where the ROMs are illegally obtained, the BIOS’s are just downloaded from a random server, and the emulators are paying to get access to the latest retail games patches like Yuzu.
All 3 of these interact and play off of each other, like arcade collections using MAME, being able to extract the ROMs from collections to use in emulators, and Nintendo using someone else’s ROM dump of their own game for Wiiware. That it’s just interesting that emulation works at all.
I personally love it, and try my best to get my ROMs, ISO, and BIOS’s without resorting to downloading it.
I’ve never really been into fighting games; I did some Smash Brothers when I was younger but that’s about it. I think fighting games are a fairly different beast entirely; they’re a far more “couch friendly” genre.
They also don’t tend to have the absolutely massive operating costs where “it costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this map” and server costs of “it cost hundreds per month to run just a few servers (because of the complexity of processing all of the elements of an individual match” that Fortnite, PUBG, and Hunt Showdown have to deal with.
Live service is worse for the shooter genre on “eventual death” … but so far none of the popular live service shooter games have really died. Meanwhile games that haven’t and are still trying to compete with the “buy the new game for a premium price tag” (like Battlefield) are hurting. Calling of Duty is another big name that almost certainly is suffering from this problem but it can’t be charted because they reorganized their game as “everything is under ‘Call of Duty’”.
The fighting games on steam don’t even come close to any of the shooter numbers.
Other big genres like strategy do fine with the big release (in no small part because a big part of their game play is single player or “play with a well known group of friends”), e.g., steamcharts.com/app/289070 and steamcharts.com/app/413150 (both of those games also have seen almost “live service-like” levels of service via additional content throughout their lifespan).
Live services get a lot of hate on Lemmy … but there genuinely is something to them when they’re done well. They’re often better for shooters because the incremental changes allow developers to back off and fix things without totally fragmenting their community.
Battlefield 2042 and Hunt Showdown: 1896 are great examples of this … They both had rocky launches. Battlefield is a bigger franchise but because they made “extreme changes” vs incremental changes Battlefield 2042 is in much worse shape than Hunt Showdown: 1896 is and Crytek will in all likelihood be able to fix the things that people are upset about and get their numbers higher than they were. Dice/EA’s best chance is “try again next year” at this point with their model (which will almost certainly cost players another $70 minimum to get into). Even then the game will remain fragmented with all the different Battlefield games out there and the expense of getting a new one.
If you’re frugal you could’ve played Hunt Showdown from 2018-present for its original price of $29 for the battlefield community for the same time frame to play on release you would’ve needed to spent $180 minimum.
I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store (lemmy.world) angielski
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Ubisoft is being sued over The Crew in a lawsuit that compares the server shutdown to a bumperless pinball machine (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
“Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed”. As reported by Polygon, that’s an argument put forth by a new lawsuit...
Silent but Deadly: I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless. (slate.com) angielski
World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the...
7/7 of Required Countries Have Met the #StopKillingGames EU Petition Threshold. angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/33837279...
Valve has created a Steam Bluesky account (bsky.app) angielski
Thinking of starting a little beehaw minehut server for minecraft what version should I go with? (java)
I am thinking before 1.19.1 when chat reporting was added. 1.7 to 1.12 seem to have less requirements to run for lower end pcs. Its just some chill fun and not pvp focused so being newer than 1.9 shouldn’t matter. I am thinking 1.15 maybe since it added bees. I guess its a compromise between how well the game runs on lower...
You Pay For It, We Own It - Sony's $7.9B Lawsuit (youtu.be) angielski
Sony is facing a $7.9 billion lawsuit that could impact over 9 million players. They’ve been accused of deleting purchased movies, TV shows, and games—items customers thought they owned forever....
Anyone have a sudden loss in gaming?
I’m in my late 30s now and over the past 6ish months, I have been gaming a lot less or I find myself gaming but not enjoying it....
'He was an incurable romantic': The boy who lived a secret life in World of Warcraft (www.bbc.com) angielski
Text-based Interactive Fiction games recommendations from Itch.io angielski
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
U.S. Copyright Office rejects DMCA exemption to support game preservation (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
This sucks.
Text-based Interactive Fiction games recommendations from Itch.io angielski
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
Text-based Interactive Fiction games recommendations from Itch.io angielski
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
Text-based Interactive Fiction games recommendations from Itch.io angielski
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
Text-based Interactive Fiction games recommendations from Itch.io angielski
This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the...
California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it (www.theverge.com) angielski
If you don’t retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like “buy” or “purchase” on the store page button. I hope there aren’t huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there’s no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not...
Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code (cyberinsider.com)
cross-posted from: discuss.tchncs.de/post/22527376...
Spellbreak, Shut Down When Its Developer Was Acquired By Blizzard, Is Still Alive - Aftermath (aftermath.site)
I have been getting into emulation (discussion)
I have been getting into emulation though there is no emulation community here to talk about it. I assume emulation discussion in gaming is welcome any thoughts?
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