Dev Workshop: Railjack Revisited Information

[SprinKah]

If you guys are gonna stick with the ONE PER HAZARD thing. Perhaps make them affect your ship and you A LOT MORE!

Suggestions:

1) Hull breach: The longer it stays on, every 10s or something, your RJ's health will lose a portion of its health, because the vacuum of space ain't no joke, a giant breach on a spaceship would be very damaging. Maybe something like the moment a hull breach appears, your RJ health will go from 6060 -> 5500 and after 10s it will continue to lose more and more. 5000-> 4500 -> 4000 until Catastrophic Failure. Something along that line. Maybe it will also cause some the blue hue effect like when you break the window on Corpus ship, deafening your sound.

2) Fire hazard: It will make the entire room that it's in super hot, laying patches of fire everywhere, smoke and everything, like back when Sabotage Reactior Meltdown damages you in the entire room and such. It will damages and decrease your RJ's health a lot faster than currently.

3) Electric hazard: Disables your abilities, maybe disables 80% of your shield or something, Flies slower, less dash.

 

I don't think it's too unreasonable, now that you guys are planning to drastically decrease the hazard chance (which is a shame imo)

[Jangkrik]

6 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

The details of WARFRAME REVISED PART 4: RAILJACK REVISITED are as follows. These are not complete Patch Notes. These were mentioned on stream, but we wanted to give everyone a chance to review them in a true 'Dev Workshop' fashion. Just under 500 Tenno will be playing these changes over the weekend for practical feedback. 

Please take a look and know the goal is to revisit the pacing and feel of all Railjack missions.

General Changes:

• Doubled the Railjack’s innate loot-pickup (Vacuum) Range.
• Changing the pacing and general feel of all Railjack Piloting and movement to be less reliant on the optimal strategy of “Single strafe Boost then Repeat”: 
  • Doubled the Railjack’s base Speed. 
  • Lowered Boost Speed by 75% 
  • Increased the Boost Speed cost of dodge. 
  • Increased Boost Drain (8 - 15)
• Made scale a factor in damage reduction and bonuses. This means Archwings and their weapons will do more damage to ships, while also taking less damage from them.
• Fixed inconsistencies with the sensitivities of the emplacement positions (side turrets now match the pilot turret)
• Doubled Revolite crafting yield from 50 to 100
• Tripled values of Titanium and Asterite resource drops

Really loving these proposed changes, especially regarding AW damage. However, for the loot-pickup, is there any reason why the loot is just not made global? RJ map is huge, especially compared to our vacuuming ability. While keeping the vacuum (instead of global auto loot) for normal gameplay is understandable since it is manageable to sweep around the tile and pick up stuffs, but it's quite different with how huge RJ is.

 

6 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

On-Foot Combat Changes:

• Reduced the Health of all on-foot Grineer Railjack enemies by half.
• Removed scaled damage controllers from all on-foot Grineer Railjack enemies.

I'm not sure how tanky they are after the change. I think it would be nice to make them on par with Sortie or R3-4 Lich level enemies (in Veil) so that they're not too easy, but also not too difficult.

 

6 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Pacing Changes:

• Added Caps for the amount of simultaneous Railjack Hazards (Fire, Electric, and Breaches). Your Railjack can only have 1 of each Hazard active at a time.
• Drastically decreased the frequency of RJ Hazard types.
• Made each RJ Hazard type more harmful to the ship.
• Increased the amount of Omni Revolite required to remove hazard events, but increased the XP gained.
• Increased the number of fighters in all alert stages.
• Enemies now spawn much closer to the Railjack vs. 1000+ km away. 
• Destroying all engines on a Crewship now disables weapons.

Archwing Changes / Fixes:

• Longstanding issues with the usability of Archwing Melee has been fixed - it’s whacking day - let us know!. 
• Archwing Melee Range mods now affects aim assist lock-on range.
• Archwing Gun stats normalized - space combat now uses ground “Heavy Weapon” stats.
• UI Lead indicator has been added to relevant Archwing Guns.

Nice QoL changes and fixes!

 

6 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Avionics Changes: 

When it comes to Avionics changes, there’s an overarching goal: Simplify Avionic management. 

• Each Integrated Avionic Type will now only exist with a single Manufacturer rather than three Manufacturer flavors.
• The ‘retired’ Integrated Avionics will be removed from players inventory via a script.
• The remaining Integrated Avionic for each Type will take on the values of the previously highest valued Avionic of it’s Type.
• ALL Dirac used to upgrade Integrated Avionics will be refunded. This applies to both retired and remaining Avionics.
• ALL remaining Integrated Avionics will have their Upgrades drained.

Having multiple manufacturers are actually quite nice (not taking into account the RNG aspect) since different manufacturers have different efficiency, which is useful for build diversity. For example, Vidar/Lavan avionics tend to have very good efficiency (around 80% of Zetki's at maxed avionic & slot) for almost half the cost. Since we can't forma RJs, I think this adds to the build possibilities. I'll really miss these parts since a lot of the high rank avionics are damn inefficient.

For example, I prefer Lavan Polar Coil to Zetki since I get 56% increased heat capacity for 6 drain compared to 66% increased heat capacity for 11 drain. The benefits is not even 50% more but the cost is almost doubled. Similar case applies to other integrated avionics like Section Density and Warhead.

I hope that these efficiency factors are looked on instead of just copy pasting the avionic with the highest drain with the new implementation because our RJ capacity is very limited.

 

6 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Battle Avionic Refresh:

Munitions Vortex

Vortex is now attached to the front of your Railjack

Increased Vortex radius from 30 to 60

Increased radius from 150 to 200

Shatter Burst

Display range stat on all marked targets while projectile is in flight

Range increased from 120 to 200

Damage increased from 500 to 1000

Radius increased from 60 to 80

Fall off decreased from 100% to 50%

Void Hole

Decreased duration from 25 to 12 secs

Increased attraction strength

I think these are generally good changes (especially for Shatter Burst). I kind of dislike the nerf for Void Hole (it looks more like a nerf than rework) since I use it quite often, but it's good that the it is not really overblown. Can't comment for Particle Ram since I'm not sure how it will perform after the changes.

 

Lastly, is there any possibility of reworking the reactors? As it stands, Vidar is still the indisputable king because having more avionics benefit us way more than flux capacity.

[Fran_Bow_Dagenhart]

Strafing results in aim direction to shift to the other direction. If I strafe left, my aim will shift right so much that I will miss my target unless I jerk my mouse to the left to compensate. This effect impedes pilot aiming and needs to be reduced by 2/3rd at least.

[Faerwald]

I think I'm okay with this, mostly. Hard to say before playing through the changes. 

One thing that worries me though is the lack of mentions of boarding parties. I feel like those are way too frequent. Maybe we could at least have a special marker on ramsleds so we can destroy those in time. would be a first step towards reducing the number of home invasions we have to suffer through (which can be fun, a couple times, but I feel like you end up constntly cleaning your ship, instead of actively working on the objectives). 

[Fran_Bow_Dagenhart]

Waiting for boost to recharge contributes negatively to the flow of gameplay, period.

I suggest to make boost meter always be charging even when boost is active with variable charge rate depending on remaining boost energy amount, which increases the lower the boost meter level is. Avionics and intrinsics should be added so that players can build for a railjack with boost cost that is lower than peak boost regeneration rate in this system--either by having avionics that reduce boost cost or increase boost energy regen rate.

Another bad contributor to the gameplay flow is traversing long distances; the missions quite often involve travelling over 10km with no combat whatsoever.  I suggest adding a microwarp system where very high maximum speed can be achieved for a brief moment at the cost of all boost energy and turning speed, but microwarp activation requires the boost meter to be completely full.

Example of my suggested energy system:

Example of microwarp:

 

[KitMeHarder]

The majority of these changes are positive, and some of them are very positive. But as with most things in life, I am here to point out the changes I don't like.

• Reduced Boost Effectiveness - We'll see how this goes with the increased base speed, but I'm not optimistic. 
• No mention of an "organic" way to gain flux energy- AKA no way to regen flux energy from doing in-mission actions, only by building it.
• Battle Avionics - Particle Ram is worded very oddly, so it has me really concerned. And a meaningless nerf to Void Hole in my opinion, especially when you compare it to its Warframe ability counterpart. And there ends up being many reasons why this Avionic does not warrant an over 50% nerf to its duration.
• Archwing Melee Stat Refresh - Fine I guess. But you just went from the Centaur is the only one worth using, to the Prisma Veritux is the only one worth using.

And unless I misheard, Scott seems to have said opposing things about how intense Railjack combat will be. Hopefully "more intense and demigod-esque similar to the base game" is the intended change.

[RobertTheKomodoDragon]

Quote

Halved the Health and Armour of all Grineer Fighters.

Reduced the Health of all on-foot Grineer Railjack enemies by half.

Hurray, now everything's gonna be even more brain-dead easy to kill. /s

[DrivaMain]

1 minute ago, RobertTheKomodoDragon said:

Hurray, now everything's gonna be even more brain-dead easy to kill. /s

Hurray, now we don't need to use Extreme Meta Setups with Godroll rivens to deal with RJ enemies because they are no longer bullet sponges.

[mikakor]

6 hours ago, Jarriaga said:

I'm not happy about it. But I understand it's a lost cause since convenience will always win for the same reason universal vacuum was demanded for pets.

do i need to get from that message that you think vacuum for pets was something bad? because allow me to laugh, if so.

[wtrmlnjuc]

6 hours ago, (PS4)LeBlingKing said:

Third, Warframe isn't/is no longer(?) a game that's meant to be challenging. Let people enjoy their arcade-like gameplay, Warframes were literally designed to make you feel like a god shooting at lesser beings like clones, zombies, robots, and merchant cult members.

I think adding more challenge back is doable down the road now that we have better scaling and status changes. If it's stable and balanced, it should be easier to create fun difficulty for.

[anarchy753]

1 minute ago, wtrmlnjuc said:

I think adding more challenge back is doable down the road now that we have better scaling and status changes. If it's stable and balanced, it should be easier to create fun difficulty for.

I mean there was no room for other modes like Survival. Look at Scarlet Spear, past the third Murex fighters become obscene to try to kill, and you're better off ignoring them. Having a baseline like this actually gives the scaling somewhere to go.

[SpicyDinosaur]

28 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

Hurray, now we don't need to use Extreme Meta Setups with Godroll rivens to deal with RJ enemies because they are no longer bullet sponges.

You don't need them currently. There are multiple options and no particular set up is must have meta.

You just have to play something you are functional at.

[Damocles]

7 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Avionics Changes: 

When it comes to Avionics changes, there’s an overarching goal: Simplify Avionic management. 

• Each Integrated Avionic Type will now only exist with a single Manufacturer rather than three Manufacturer flavors.
• The ‘retired’ Integrated Avionics will be removed from players inventory via a script.
• The remaining Integrated Avionic for each Type will take on the values of the previously highest valued Avionic of it’s Type.
• ALL Dirac used to upgrade Integrated Avionics will be refunded. This applies to both retired and remaining Avionics.
• ALL remaining Integrated Avionics will have their Upgrades drained.

I dont use the maxed drain variants on my ship. Example: Zetki Hullweave is 13 drain for 90% damage reduction, but Vidar is 8 drain for 89% damage reduction. (armor system is busted)

7 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Particle Ram

Requires forward velocity to be active

Rank 10 Pilot was already useless. Since touching enemies instantly killed them, this avionic was pretty much only good for dealing damage when parked in void hole, and opening crates. With the piloting/boosting changes coming, can we get maxed boost reserves instead of whatever rank 10 pilot is now?

7 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Void Hole

Decreased duration from 25 to 12 secs

Increased attraction strength

This sounds bad. I really hope you really increased the attraction strength because previously we needed all 25 seconds waiting for enemies to slide inside

[Xaero]

7 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

The ‘retired’ Integrated Avionics will be removed from players inventory via a script.

How about replacing them with new ones?

[SpicyDinosaur]

37 minutes ago, -Damocles- said:

I dont use the maxed drain variants on my ship. Example: Zetki Hullweave is 13 drain for 90% damage reduction, but Vidar is 8 drain for 89% damage reduction. (armor system is busted)

This sounds to me like the drain should be lowered on the highest tier of avionics after going over all of them and reviewing cost vs drain. Even then, however, different classes of the avionics are obviously useful, and the change proposed could be very negative towards diversity in builds.

Homogenizing the avionics by making each one one manufacturer only isn't a good solution. IMHO

[ntyd1s]

You're.. making.. this.. too easy.. so how about adding increased difficulty mode with better reward? }:D

[Riccoshot]

1. Speed/Boost Speed changes are extremely questionable, because i fail to see how this..

9 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

to be less reliant on the optimal strategy of “Single strafe Boost then Repeat”

... was that much of an issue that you decided to do the proposed changes.

 

2. Avionics "dumbification" is questionable as well. The system and the idea behind is working would be working if whoever was putting avionics number actually structured it better, you know.
Let me examplify: I don't run Zetki Bulkhead/Hull Weave because it is legit not needed for something like Veil nodes and even the on-going event.

So i opted for both Vidar options for a lower drain, to be able to find extra space (on a 99 Vidar engine btw) to fill up the grid with useful stuff - all 3 battle avionics, all 3 tactical avionics, cause i actually use them.
6k RJ HP was like bringing Inaros into high level starchart mission - enemies still damage you, but you just don't go below certain threshold in any given period of time. The difference with inaros example though, is that me and/or my team actually need to perform good to stay within this threshold.

This is where it worked, both in theorycrafting and in game when i opted for Zetki replacement with Vidar.

BUT the thing is, if you would look up every integrated avionic one by one you won't be able to find consistency because it's all over the place.
Was it supposed to be tiered like MK1-3 parts i.e. higher tier is straight up better? Because some of them appear to be so.
Was it supposed to be tiered via Houses, just like Components (engine, reactor, shield array) do? Because some of them appear to be so.
And for every example of a given avionic that at the very least follows some pattern, there's some that were just put out there without much thought.
Why do we have avionics tiered so that their "middle/balanced" option with a less potent effect then the best House option have same or even more drain then the best one, therefore nullifying the meaning for some options to exist?

Examples: Anode Cell (Lavan/Vidar), Conic Nozzle (Vidar/Zetki), Hyperstrike (Vidar/Zetki), Maxima (Lavan/Vidar), Thermatic (all 3 Houses), Winged Force (all 3 options).
Might as well add up a few complete out of scale proportions increase in terms of  "Drain" to the "effect %" - Hyperflux (Vidar/Zetki), Ion Burn (Zetki/Lavan), Polar Coil (Lavan/Zetki), Ripload (Lavan/Zetki), Winged Cyclone (Vidar/Zetki)

If you think that i am myself proven the need of cutting out "dead avionic" options, i'm very much not, this is simplest "cause & effect" scenario, it seems that you want to cut them out because of the existence of "dead" options, but the "dead" options should not exist in the first place.
I mean, there was the person behind it, right? Seeing this mess/inconsistency of numbers, well yeah, the job was not done very well there.

So what is that, that i would like to see in the end?
Either the "untitled avionics number guy" gets them right (took me 10 minutes to scoop through avionics wiki page to refresh my memory on "dead" options) and you preserve the House system by making it right this time. I'm stating this option because setting the avionics correctly doesn't seem like that hard of a job to do.
Or we're still cutting out the "dead" avionics and transitioning to conversation on "The Big Drain of The Best in Class Avionics Because There's Just That 1 Option Now", because this very corresponding concern is not mentioned within the avionic changes. Either way - you still need to make numbers right.

3. No further commentary on anything else cause it's either essential/technical fixes (Arch melee literally not working) or general QoL that are all that good (they actually are) and decent, but long overdue for anyone who's been playing RJ long enough.

[R34LM]

One issue I see with normalizing avionics is that people were using other housed avionics to reduce consumption while still getting a good benefit, like I was using the mid-tier hull weave and polar coil. Now that all avionics are max rank, and therefore max avionic cost, I think we are going to have a harder time slotting stuff in unless you increase avionic capacity.

[HunterDigi]

When will these be released if testing yields they're good to go?

 

Gotta say, most of these changes are quite welcome.

 

My RJ is focused on speed (even before the event) and I'm curious how the speed, boost and avionics changes will affect that, hopefully by not gimping its ability to move really fast when needed.

 

Finally a bigger range for loot vacuum. However can we please get some avionic (passive or ability, tactical would be annoying with cooldowns for something like this) to gather loot in an even bigger range? Because going after every fighter you kill is annoying, unless you use black hole and/or tether which is one of the biggest reasons to use those (apart from easier destroying with one missile).

Also, lots of environmental things with loot which RJ can't pick up because they either ignore vacuum alltogether or RJ can't reach them at all due to collisions, I don't think doubling the range is gonna be enough, at least not if there's no avionic for it.

 

The avionics changes are quite vague, which avionics exactly are gonna stay?

- the most powerful ones per type?

- a specific house only?

- removing all and re-introducing them as tweaked variants based on usage stats?

The last one sounds drastic because it's incorrect data by the time the other changes arrive.

I imagine a lot of RJs focused on speed during the scarlet spear event because other characteristics of the RJ were mostly useless when you just park it inside the murex and forget about it, especially with how weak the satellite was at the begining, we don't waste time now fiddling about collecting loot, we just go fast because a single shot could destroy the statellite before and not gonna test its resilience now at the risk of losing time that's for sure.

[rodzzila]

can you change "Drift Maneuver" Pilot skill so it no longer always lunch you forward when you stop using it? It should lunch you in the direction the Railjack is going or only when your going forwards instead.

[master_of_destiny]

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and express some positivity.  The changes generally seem to be what we should have gotten in January...which is better than nothing I guess.  This being said, let's touch on a few bits of frustration that I'm currently seeing here.

 

1) The nerf to particle ram and void hole.  Yes, both of these battle avionics are taken by nearly everyone.  The former as a set and forget shield and low damage source.  The later because gigantic waves of enemies come in at high speeds and you are effectively required to use it as crowd control.  I'm happy that the ships are going to be less tanky...but both of these nerfs are going to make it much more difficult to fly a ship solo.

2) Valence transfer on weapons....but what about the components?  What about trading wreckage?  I'd be happier if this was clear.  It wouldn't be so bad if you could get 2-3 reactors, then combine them into a good maxed one.  As of right now, RNG drop, RNG stats, and everyone in the group gets a unique roll.  Not a fun system.

 

3) The reset of avionics is...ok.  You've realized that they should be like mods, and you'll reset everything and let us deal with it.  Fantastic.  You still haven't addressed the elephant in the room here, so let's cover it.  Right now a full 100 avionics reactor with only 90 energy leaves me with multiple grid positions I can't fill.  It's not a question of choice for how I want to build, it's the fact that drain for primary avionics is too high.  Maybe you could outline a reduction is cost of staple avionics, without a nerfing of them, so that we could build unique setups?

Let me expand upon this farther.  Health, Shields, Armor, turret damage, and cooling are a functional requirement for the railjack.  If you don't want to board everything, artillery power is also required.  6 mods out of 9 are selected, with high drains on all of them.  Take three battle powers (void hole, particle ram, and munitions vortex), and you're down to nothing on the avionics front.   Maybe it's time to decrease the cost of the staples, and allow some diversity of builds?  There's literally no reason to include the archwing avionics, crit modifiers, or anything else because the enemies require so much damage and control.

4) The railjack is going to be faster.  I'm holding my breath here, because I'm waiting for it to then be qualified with the intrinsics being nerfed into oblivion.  You'll note that a lot of the pilot intrinsics are focused on drifting, boosting, and the like.  

 

5) There's a lot to be considered with the intrinsics getting a flat doubling of earnings rates.  Namely, those of us who are looking at this, and have earned half of the total needed (9 for each category) are going to be less than happy.  I'm looking at your plan, and at this point I'm pretty underwhelmed when a run of Earth might only earn 2 intrinsic.  I think maybe you need to give us some assistance here, as the hours and hours of grind in Scarlet Spear is looking pretty insulting.

6) Finally, let's look at the tripling of drop rates.  Holy crap.  You had a drop rate.  You doubled it.  You then plan to triple it.  In a mission where I could get 500 titanium I will now get 3,000 titanium.  I cannot even begin to tell you how insulting this is, after you functionally halved the cost of Railjack.  Yes, you're changing what was a 30 run (15000/500) down to a 5 run grind, and there's no mention of player time respect.  Let me touch on the history of that response, so you understand me.  The Hema (mutagen samples).  The Sibear (cryotic).  Vauban Prime (I'm going Nitain).  Zephyr (yes, I ground out 300 when oxium ospreys dropped 1-2 units per kill).  All of these things took months or years to fix, if they were at all.  You claimed to be respecting player investment.  Let's be real here, railjack is not going down well and you are trying to fix an economy that is so busted it isn't funny.  Now that we're on this page, let's propose a fix.  Double what titanium is in everyone's inventory, halve the cost of components using titanium.  The immediate feeling is a huge bonus (x4 buying power), but the long term is only a halving of costs.  That x4 will rapidly shrink to below the x3 you're shooting at while producing much more good will.

 

 

Now that I'm done taking a dump all over what is still missing, let's touch on why I'm optimistic.

1) Command intrinsics?  Yeah, no mention.  4+ months and we've got nothing.  This sounds like a failure, but I'm glad you aren't just pushing it out.  

2) Valence transfers....finally.  This is still frustrating RNG, but with only 30 spots for all wreckage and no trades the inventory is constantly filling with garbage.  I'm going to be happy to have two of each weapon at their max stats, and recycle everything else.  The 30-70% of maximum stats garbage is an insulting reward with the current economy, especially when avionics can often yield more dirac.

3) Less events is a blessing.  Anyone who has played the game mode knows a boarding party can have 6-10 events in less than a minute, and the time mopping them up invites more to happen.  This is like Hearts of Iron in my space ninja game....that's less peanut butter and jelly and more iron spikes inside hot sauce.

4) Faster ships.  This is praise and depression.  The railjack is useless now without boost, and engines often don't really give a significant difference in play.  If we could be fast enough to at least outrun the crewships....  Hopefully that's true now without Ion Burn and Conical nozel.  

5) Crewships stop firing when engines are down.  This is always annoying, because you effectively slowed the ship to hit with the artillery, but were forced to soak damage.  It's a real improvement that the enemy isn't just waiting out a minor mobility debuff and taking chunks out of you while waiting for the painfully slow artillery to charge up.

 

 

I'm under the impression that the test cluster will be focused heavily on this, and I'm hoping that you are also doing some bug fixing.  Railjack is still not a good experience 4+ months in, and you've sold a lot of this game's future on it.  Hopefully this will give you enough to make the experience...less painful if not enjoyable.  I'm still holding my hopes for having auto-turret side gunners and boarding party death traps to make the game fun for solo play after heavy investment into command.  Considering the 512 intrinsic cost of teleporting to a squad mate, doing ramming damage, remote fixing stuff, and auto-targeting on turrets....I'm not holding my breath.  Intrinsics forgot all of the lessons of Focus, and just like the space damage types you're trying to rebuild a functional wheel.   KISS.  Keep It Simple Stupid.  You don't need to be Star Citizen, you need to be Star Fox 64.  Less pretty tech demo, more shooty-shooty bang-bang with space ninjas.  That's what we want.  I could give a toss less about the amazing new graphics when I keep getting killed by something with infinitely homing projectiles that I have no counter for.

[Sapphirya]

Most of these changes sound excellent, though I'm a little worried about capacity costs for the new mods changing. I suppose we'll have to wait and see. Any thoughts about tweaking the damage values on the swarm missile battle avionic, though? As it stands it remains little more than a fancy light show.

[Toff]

Can't I charge Munitions Vortex with my shooting?

[Graavarg]

9 hours ago, Buff00n said:

As a pilot I spend a lot of time going backwards so I can shoot at pursuing ships.  I feel like this will mostly relegate Particle Ram to resource farming, which is still useful but not nearly as much.  Can you still launch Particle Ram when going backwards?

I agree. And "moving backwards" is not the only other space fight move, so is moving sideways, and up or down. Having the ram blink on-and-off due to minuscule movement changes seems like "not such a great mechanic" (if it even works).

I assume the idea is to not be able to use the Ram as a protective, fighter-killing shield anymore when parking your Railjack in a suitable location ("rump in"), and that is of course fine. However, since the Particle Ram is currently more of a force-field dealing damage over time (not a "ram" dealing an amount of damage depending on "collision energy", based on a "real physics" approach), a "Particle Ram active while moving" would work better. Regardless of in which direction you are moving.

[GingaNinjah]

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