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I think at launch, not having a group finder could have saved Wildstar. With group finders comes the expectation that you just breeze through a dungeon when you queue for it. This was a massive cause for people leaving- they tried to do the attunement by queueing for it. Without a dungeon finder, people would be inclined to do a lot more preparation from dungeons. WoW proves this- Cata dungeons weren't that much harder than they used to be, it's just that everyone queued and expected to get instantly geared. I could be wrong, just a thought I came up with since I quit Wildstar.
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May 13, 2016 19:54
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This game has done quite a few really cool things and has a really interesting story to experience. However I think a big killer for the game early on wasn't just bugs or fundamental miscalculations on certain key design decisions that split or drove off the community in unfortunate ways. I think what hurt this game the most was unrealistic profit expectations and insufficient investment of capital into the game post launch to successfully launch a new IP in a super crowded market.
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May 13, 2016 20:03
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Shes a video game developer. Of course she is.
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May 13, 2016 22:37
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Wasn't he the "well close the game down before we go f2p" guy.
DapperDraculaDeer fucked around with this message at 16:17 on May 15, 2016 |
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May 15, 2016 16:14
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noELrunes posted:https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/151807-wildstar-coming-to-steam/ So are they ever going to announce a date for the Steam release? They keep talking about it but seem incapable of actually making it happen.
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Jun 6, 2016 02:40
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Doing the Steam launch with very little fanfare and marketing was a pretty smart move. Instead of a massive influx of players crashing the servers now things will be more manageable. In a week or two Carbine can start running ads for the game to try to draw more plays in. I wonder if Carbine's management actually learned something from their past mistakes.
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Jun 9, 2016 19:30
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I suppose I should specific that by "massive influx of players" I mean "enough to crash the servers"
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Jun 9, 2016 19:42
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I went ahead and gave this game a go. The f2p launch was such a disaster I really didnt get to play, and Ive always wanted to give it another chance since I felt there was so much potential. It really does feel like Carbine hasnt learned a loving thing though. Logging into a character you continue to be absolutely bombarded with poo poo. You log in, the area around you loads, the UI loads.... and then the information overload begins. Before I can even open my bags a nagging quest notified pops up despite the fact that I have given no indication I would like a new quest. Then the help menu opens. Then a Protostar Corporate Bot appears at the top of my screen to provide flavor text for the quest I just turned down. Then the "please dont forget the cash shop" window opens up. Its just more and more bullshit that makes it feel impossible to play the game, and none of it explains where the gently caress my pants went. Seriously, was my account hacked or something? No? Apparently instead of just replacing my pants with an equivalent piece of gear, I have been given a token for new pants. So I wade through the steady stream of quest notifications(seriously what the gently caress is my holocrom constantly blinking?) to find the token merchant(none of the popups have bothered to tell me where this merchant is, nor is he on the map, I had to wander around to find him). Can I just trade this token for my new gear so I can go play? No? Ok apparently I have to actually craft my new pants. All the stats are different now though so I have to figure out what they do. What stats do I need? To make matters worse, on the crafting screen the stats you are assigning to your item dont have a working tooltip. Nor is the actual name of the stat displayed. So you can see the icon for that stat, but if you dont know what icon represents crit, or multistrike, or one of the other metric gently caress ton of stats in the game you are in trouble. To make things worse, its not just my pants that I have to recraft from a token, its about six slots worth of gear. And after I slog through that I have to slog through reconfiguring my AMPs, since they have all been reset(instead of just changed to be roughly equivlaent to what I had before), I am missing abilities so I have to set my LAS back up. Its probably going to be an hour before I actually do a single quest, and despite the game's never ending stream of "helpful" annoyances, not a single one of them have actually helped me with all this poo poo. Seriously, what the gently caress Carbine? I am trying to give your game another shot, but you are making it nearly impossible. This "information overload" style of design is what made leveling in the game annoying the first time around. Somehow it seems to have gotten even worse. Has no one actually learned from past mistakes? DapperDraculaDeer fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jun 10, 2016 |
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Jun 10, 2016 21:26
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Percelus posted:so if the steam release doesn't somehow turn this smoldering dumpster fire around will ncsoft pull the plug finally? I doubt it. NCSoft is on the hook for what has to be some pretty hefty development costs. They will probably at least keep it on lifesupport for as long as the cash shop is bringing in some money. Then again, the game looks positively embarrassing on the quarterly earnings report. It is so bad that various video game news sites routinely run a small piece about how poorly Wildstar is performing. NCSoft might just jettison the thing because it is making them look bad.
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Jun 11, 2016 02:59
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Ronnie posted:Ok some questions: Im kind of surprised by your first problem. Ive generlaly found Wildstar's controls to be pretty good. Your character generally feels really responsive when moving around. This is of course assuming the game runs at a decent frame rate, which it may very well not due to the absolute terrible optimization for AMD stuff. SolidSnakesBandana posted:Oh no! Too much information! I have been overloaded, if only they displayed the appropriate amount of information! I know, it sounds kind of ridiculous but the game absolutely insists on nagging you to death with pop ups about stuff that really isnt very important. The game just throws more and more information up on screen, and you cant ignore it since if you dont click to close it you will eventually not be able to see a single thing. It makes it feel like you are spending more time clicking to close the constant stream of not so helpful garbage than you are actually playing the game. One example of this is how after you kill a mob a big "help" window pops up informing you that you need to click a button to loot everything that dropped. This is good information for new players so having this popup once isnt a necessarily bad thing, the problem is it pops up every time you kill a mob that drops loot. Over and over and over again. Eventually you figure out that if you close it in a particular manner it stops reopening, the problem is that since it pops up immediately after you kill a mob, which means you are likely in the middle of fighting one or two other mobs, you just want the loving thing to go away so you can see what you are doing and not die so you close it in the fastest way possible, which means in a few more seconds its going to open right back up when you kill mob two of three. The game is absolutely full of "help" pop ups, quest notifications, and other stuff like this that just wont go away. After about two hours of slogging through this steady bombardment of not very helpful "help" you clear all the messages, all the unsolicited quests, and all the other garbage the game throws at you and can actually play in peace. And maybe if you are lucky by then the instance you queued for will have popped, or probably not. I still havent actually been able to try any group content. According to people in chat most people run exclusively with their guild members since group content is so poor incentivized its not worth dealing with "randos" who may slow you down.
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Jun 12, 2016 21:39
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For anyone unfamiliar with Mark Kern: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1tuf3c/this_is_why_mark_kern_was_removed_as_ceo_by_red_5/
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Jun 13, 2016 03:11
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There is an incredibly vocal group of MMO players that are demanding that Blizzard launch vanilla WoW servers. The most noteworthy members are Kern, Jontron and some other Youtube weirdos. Every year or so they work themselves into a tizzy over one half baked rumor about vanilla servers or another, and then when Blizzard states quite clearly for possibly the hundredth time that there will be no vanilla servers they get angry. This has been going on for quite a while, and the most recent outbreak happened after Blizzard had a vanilla private server closed.
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Jun 13, 2016 03:25
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Interupt armor isnt necessarily a bad mechanic. The problem is that it is the only mechanic.
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Jun 14, 2016 01:39
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Banana Cream Pie posted:I didn't even know who Mark Kern was until all this so I checked his twitter weeks ago and apart from the giant anime titty header I scrolled down and all I see is that he has some weird fixation with anime girl navels that he seems to actively solicit from people, and then I saw he favorited a drawing of a prepubescent anime girl in a swimsuit alongside another tweet of a woman getting fisted by a robot and why would I ever need to know anything else about this person Im surprised there wasnt also an unhealthy smattering of ranting about feminism in there as well.
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Jun 14, 2016 15:46
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30.5 Days posted:Imagine you're one of the people who put mark kern in charge of a video game. Even worse, imagine being one of the people stuck working for him.
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Jun 14, 2016 21:57
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Warmachine posted:My friend suggested playing Wildstar the other day. I groaned and told him it was a pile of hot garbage. But I haven't played since my friend gave me a 7 day trial at launch. Is my assessment still correct? If you have someone to play with there is some fun to be found. The leveling experience is ok, its generic questing with mildly interesting combat. Dont expect to run instances while leveling with any reliability. Most of the early end game content can be queued for with 1-5 people, so you could duo that. Beyond that though you will need to find other players to clear content and that can be a problem. Your time would probably be better spent playing another game, honestly.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:20
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I think youre right. Of course, the problem is this just wouldnt ever happen. Carbine's lead designers were pretty clearly dead set on HARDCORE raiding as the main focus of the game. Unfortunately it seems most of the actual talent they had was in art, music, writing and small encounter design, while their raid designer seems to have been the adult version of a teenage D&D dungeon master who took great joy in murdering his players in ridiculous, absurd and unfun ways.
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Jun 15, 2016 20:07
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Rasmussen posted:There's only one server now right? I mean it's not breaking any records, but there will be people to play with. In my experience, there actually arent. The longest I waited for an expedition to pop was thirty minutes before I gave up. I asked in zone chat if the LFG was broken or something and was informed that no one bothers with expeditions because they arent worth the time. Everyone playing is progressed well past expeditions and adventures and the incentive to queue for randoms is so low that no one bothers. Its a mess. I suppose I could shop around for a guild willing to help me gear up, but Id rather play the game a bit and decide if its worth actually playing to before going through the trouble of finding a guild that I can tolerate/can tolerate me. Considering how abysmally bad the community of this game has been I think Id rather go play something else rather than wade into that particular pool of poo poo.
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Jun 16, 2016 19:43
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"Welfare epics are for casuals and this isnt a casual game"
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Jun 16, 2016 23:13
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Marvel Heroes seems to be doing quite well now days, although it got off to a rocky start. There probably is room for a modern super hero MMO.
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Jun 17, 2016 02:28
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Whats so funny about that? I dont get it.
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Jun 23, 2016 02:55
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What happened with TSW and t-shirts? I missed that one.
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Jun 26, 2016 00:34
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He actually did make a kind of half assed "Im sorry if you interpreted my comment that way" style apology after getting called out on it. This was a few months before he got laid off, and considering how he is one of the few Wildstar designer/managers who didnt fail upwards I suspect he and many others are aware of how big a mess he had made of the game. The funniest part though it how many posters defended him. Post is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/WildStar/comments/41ogzj/kdb_daewoo_securities_outlook_and_forecasts_for/cz4qej0 I kind of suspect that the itty bitty cult of personality that grew up around that dude did very little to help him admit his mistakes. A Redditor" posted:You'd have to be a very special kind of snowflake to see that reply as hostile and making fun of players, instead of having fun with players and telling them "you haven't seen hard yet", which is exactly what raiders that just cleared the hardest content in the game want to hear. Tons more like that in that thread. DapperDraculaDeer fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jun 26, 2016 |
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Jun 26, 2016 19:57
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AlmightyBob posted:Even mobas are failing, DOTA and LoL gobbled up almost the entire playerbase and HOTS and Smite are fighting for the scraps. Which is pretty similar to what happened in the MMO market with WoW expanding the market/gobbling it up and leaving other MMOs to fight for scraps.
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Jun 29, 2016 00:31
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I dont want to even think about how much money CCP blew on that White Wolf game they ended up canning. They havent even found a way to try to salvage the art assets like Blizzard did with Titan. Its all just money flushed down the drain. I get the feeling that CCP kind of stumbled into Eve and its success and has been just barely competent enough to keep running the game well enough to keep the fan base from revolting.
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Jun 29, 2016 23:20
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Clarste posted:WoW is very slowly dying and people love to propose their own personal pet peeves as the cause, but most likely the only reason is that it's over a decade old by now. Not to mention the fact that even while dying it's still far and away one of the most successful video games out there. I dont think WoW slowly dying because of its age, plenty of ancient MMOs are still cruising right along. I think it is dying because it hasnt done anything particularly innovative or interesting in a long, long time. It seems like all paths lead to raiding now, which is fine for a while but I cant imagine its great for player retention. Of course, doing something innovative and new is risky so I can see why Blizzard would rather have the WoW cash cow slowly generate less and less cash that can be used to create new IPs rather than risk ruining it. If WoW revenue gets too low they can just start producing more expansion to counteract the revenue lost from subscribers.
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Jun 30, 2016 22:44
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Even by the most pessimistic of estimates WoW still has 3,000,000+ accounts, that is still huge. With that said, there is a pretty clear downward trend in WoW's subscriber numbers and over the last year or two it has started to be more drastic. Not only that, but Blizzard has been signaling that WoW is less of a priority by giving it less airtime on investor calls. Its not like WoW is dead by any means, WoW isnt going to die quick or suddenly, but of a long slow declineBlizzard will continue to roll out expansions at a steady rate and extract as much revenue as they can from WoW which will probably take another 20+ years, if not longer. Maybe itll see an unexpected resurgence in popularity 30 years from now as newly minted empty nesters resubscribe, who knows.
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Jul 1, 2016 00:04
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What is going on with GW2 these days? Ive always wanted to like that game, it does a whole lot right, but its just missing something to make it all work together. I think the incredibly shoddy instances are what killed it for me.
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Jul 2, 2016 15:19
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Hiring Youtubers to make promotional videos is a pretty good idea. Wildstar has such a poor reputation that a regular marketing campaign just wouldnt work. Honestly though I think the best thing they could do is the advertising equivalent of hanging out an "under new management sign!". A few interviews with the new managers about what went wrong, what theyre changing, etc etc. That kind of honest criticism of the behavior of other developers/managers just doesnt happen in game development though, so thats off the table.
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Jul 2, 2016 16:36
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Does that 80 include customer service, or is that outsourced?
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Jul 2, 2016 18:13
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:Wildstar's leveling had this kind of sensation overload baked into its core, from the loud color schemes and the way the game itself would address you (not just calling you a cupcake, but being EXTREEEEEEEEEEME about everything all the time) to the challenges that would pop up, like when you go to collect your 10 robot bear asses and the game just steps in and goes "HEY HOW FAST CAN YOU DO IT? CLOCK'S TICKIN GOGOGOGOGOGO" on top of the game never giving you any downtime while questing, so you were either in these intense fights with regular mobs or just not playing because you needed a break, and generally everything just being very unchill. The housing was popular because it was the only thing you could do in Wildstar that was chill and didn't bug you about poo poo constantly. Until you put in the challenge plugs, then you were back on the EXTREEEEEEEEEEEEEME wagon. This is still a big issue with the game. The game just annoys the hell out of you by constantly bugging you with poo poo that you dont need or dont need to know, which makes it really hard to just play the game. Whoever is responsible for this aspect of the design needs to find a new line of work because it is absolutely obnoxious.
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Jul 3, 2016 23:13
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Verranicus posted:Not the worst D'va player I've seen, but after I told her I used to laugh at her insane rambling on the forums and asked if she actually changed her name like she said she did she got personal and started trying to hunt me down, but we ended up winning anyway. She is legit crazy and has a long history of doing this type of thing. You really dont want to try to engage with her on any level, its far better to just sit back and watch the poo poo hit the fan. The fact that she actually used to be worse than she is now is pretty disconcerting.
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Jul 19, 2016 22:29
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I always wondered why the preferred format for tours was imgur albums rather than a Youtube video. That explains it.
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Jul 23, 2016 21:18
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24-hour peak: 998 How is Carbine managing to keep the lights on at this point? That is abysmal. I really dont understand the business logic of this games continued existence.
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Jul 29, 2016 22:43
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What else can they do at this point? The only good thing I hear about Wildstar on the rare occasion that it comes up is the raids. In order to even hang onto what little population they have left they need more raid content or raiders will get bored and quit. I cant imagine any way Carbine could turn things around at this point. It seems like all thats left to do is extract as much money from the player base as possible in an attempt to recoup some of the money NCSoft has lost on the game.
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Aug 26, 2016 05:26
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Liquid Communism posted:IIRC, just under 150k. Do you have any data to support this? Because I am really, really struggling to believe CoX had that many players. Or that NCSoft would be dumb enough to kill off a game with that many actual players. Even for an F2P game, 150,000 active players is a gold mine.
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Sep 2, 2016 02:42
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Did they ever actually state that? Because that would be very, very weird. To not have backups would be well beyond even the level of incompetence Carbine's management displayed. For MMOs and similar games rolling back is just not something that is done in response to a dupe bug, even if it is bad enough to mess up the game's economy. The same thing happened with D3 and Blizzard just left it to straighten itself out with time too. A roll back is a very, very big deal that will cause way more upset customers than a jacked up economy will.
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Sep 19, 2016 12:25
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I think thats usually so people can determine if they can actually play together more than any particular rivalry between the two factions. Earlier in WoW's life there was definitely a pretty well developed rivalry for sure though but it seems like Blizzard has been moving away from that. In a few more expansions I wouldnt be surprised at all to see them do away with most barriers between factions.
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Oct 19, 2016 23:59
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The rage a shaman with a big, slow two hander getting a lucky windfury proc could generate was absolutely astounding.
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Oct 20, 2016 14:44
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NCSoft is going to keep Wildstar on life support and extract as much money as they can from the player base in an effort to get at least some of their money back. There is zero chance theyll spend a dime to bring back CoH when they are just hoping to reduce the size of the loss theyre taking on Wildstar.
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Oct 23, 2016 05:21
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