Larian Studios
Posted By: Burdock The rest system is a missed opportunity - 11/10/20 03:10 AM
I expect there are further plans for resting as early access progresses. Regardless, this feedback should be relevant given the current game state.

Currently resting feels like a missed opportunity at best. The camp is beautifully implemented with great story beats. Unfortunately the gameplay impact, to me, leaves much to be desired.

Currently resting has no limitations or drawbacks. You can rest after every fight. This has an adverse impact on game balance. This likely results in one of two outcomes:
  • The fights are tuned for full slots, encouraging players to rest before every encounter.
  • The fights are tuned for partial slots, allowing resting to trivialize fights.


A case can be made for not resting if it makes the game too easy, but I personally don't like the idea of an overpowered mechanic that we are simply told not to use. Saving scrumming more than enough already.


For this reason, I would love to see resting turned into a better game mechanic that adds to the depth of combat and exploration.










I am not proposing any exact solution. But here are some ways other games that have implemented interesting meta-resource mechanics like resting:

Safety - DnD
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The basis for most of the mechanics in BG3 uses "safety" to limit rests. Basically, this turns dungeons into gauntlets. You must complete the 3-4 encounters in the area before getting access to a safe place to rest. This works well in a tabletop setting with a DM controlling the finer details. Game implementations can be hit or miss depending on how well the areas are built around this mechanic.


Timer - Fallout, Pillars of Eternity
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You have X days to complete your next objective. Normally these are not prohibitively low values, giving you plenty of rests while still giving some sociological pressure not to rest spam. This would also fit nicely with the whole mind flayer tadpole shenanigans.


Resources - Pathfinder Kingmaker, Darkest Dungeon
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Resting takes resources, limiting how often it can be done, and giving incentives to minimize it even further. This requires decent scaling through the game to balance but can work.


Complex incentives - XCOM, Darkest Dungeon
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A bit off genre, but XCOM is an excellent example of meta-game planning and resource management. I am by NO means suggested BG3 should have something anywhere near that complex. But it is a good example of successfully mixing resting and preparation mechanics in a game.


Posted By: Certheri Re: The rest system is a missed opportunity - 11/10/20 04:06 AM
Just want to say that I absolutely loathe games with countdown timers, and really would like that to not be a feature in this one.

Would just rather you have to be in the overworld in order to rest, and if you're not then you can't. That's my suggestion. Thematically makes sense, and makes it so you have to commit for dungeons, or at least inconvenience you if you want to rest between every fight (requiring you to run all the way back through to get back from the overworld), which still thematically makes sense.
+1

You said it very well that there are two possible outcomes. I am finding so far that #2 is mostly true (you do not need most slots for most fights, so with constant long resting you can steamroll most encounters).

I wonder if it would be possible to add an actual day/night cycle to the game. In 5e you gain the benefits of a long rest only once every 24 hours. This prevents the problem of trying to constantly long rest in a dungeon etc. I imagine this would be borderline impossible to implement in a reasonable way but mentioning it as another consideration.

Another possibility that would probably fall under the idea of resources is that you must earn a certain amount of XP between long rests. The amount would scale based on your level. I could see this causing potential issues where you could get stuck with too few resources but maybe a hard save and a "reset to last long rest" option could help avoid any major game-ending / TPK issues.
Honestly, though... Hasn't every single BG game been prone to the abuse of rest mechanics? Heck, they even had "rest until fully healed" options!
Posted By: Tzelanit Re: The rest system is a missed opportunity - 11/10/20 04:29 AM
I agree with almost all of your points with the exception of a "deadline" timer. The X amount of days always made me paranoid that I couldn't explore as thoroughly as I could because I wasn't sure how close I was going to be able to cut it and complete that task. I always ended up doing about 1/3 of what I'd normally do and then give in and move onto the next deadline. That didn't make for a fun experience for me.
Posted By: Bray Re: The rest system is a missed opportunity - 11/10/20 04:47 AM
+1

Limiting resting would go a long way in almost every aspect.

Potions would be more important
Spells would be more important
Dungeons would feel like dungeons

suggestion 1 or 3 from OP sound perfect to me.
Great post, Burdock!

For me, frequent resting is essential, as I am so weak at the game that my party is always on the brink of destruction. What is happening instead of resting, since the game is so difficult for me, is that the entire process is three steps forward, two steps back, i.e. making some progress by consuming all potions and spells etc. and losing huge amounts of health, and then reloading and trying again with what has been learned about the location of monsters and their reactions etc.

How many times is an ordinary player meant to take to complete the trapped man in the burning building? How many times should an ordinary person have to save and re-fight the goblin boss? Really, I would like to know this. The burning man I did over ten times and still haven't helped him find his wife. The Goblin boss I have tried 3 times and failed so far. That is totally what I expect now. I don't know how people have managed to play through the entire game yet.
+1 Particularlly the long rest needs to be limited.
Posted By: Burdock Re: The rest system is a missed opportunity - 11/10/20 05:23 AM
Originally Posted by Tzelanit
The X amount of days always made me paranoid that I couldn't explore as thoroughly as I could because I wasn't sure how close I was going to be able to cut it and complete that task.



Agreed. Personally I loved XCOMs and Darkest Dungeons "timer lite" mechanics that simply have short term incremental punishments for not accomplishing enough in a given day. The long term "100 days to finish the game" is really hard to actually play around on your first playthrough and simply leads to paranoia.
I rested after every fight through all of BG1. It’s not a big issue for me. But if it were to change, then expensive camping supplies would be my preferred way.

I love hoarding gold in case an expensive Item I really want shows up. If it cost me 100-200 gold in supplies, camp guards, lodging etc, you can be dammed sure I would minimize that shit and be diligent about which fights I pick.
Posted By: Tuco Re: The rest system is a missed opportunity - 11/10/20 07:39 AM
My drawback for absolutely NOT "resting at every fight" (fun fact: more than 10 hours into my third character I'm exploring the spider caves under the village and I have yet to rest ONCE) is that it would be fucking boring and a tedious waste of time.

But hey, I'd be all for enforcing some restriction.
Except developers probably don't want to even attempt that sort of mechanic or they would be SIEGED by Kotaku and all the gaming press of people who can't play decently to save their life would cry about how elitism and gatekeeping are preventing them from having fun or something.
Posted By: Riandor Re: The rest system is a missed opportunity - 11/10/20 07:53 AM
Wasn’t there talk of the tadpole “issue” meaning we had a timer?
I oppose resting limits, it sounds good but realisticly it would just hurt those who wanna play wizards etc. I'd rather not see limits. especially as to put it bluntly Larian seems to be expecting us to rest frequently. if they didn't they'd not toss the kind of combat encounters at us they're doing
Posted By: Raivorus Re: The rest system is a missed opportunity - 11/10/20 08:34 AM
Originally Posted by Certheri
Just want to say that I absolutely loathe games with countdown timers, and really would like that to not be a feature in this one.

Would just rather you have to be in the overworld in order to rest, and if you're not then you can't. That's my suggestion. Thematically makes sense, and makes it so you have to commit for dungeons, or at least inconvenience you if you want to rest between every fight (requiring you to run all the way back through to get back from the overworld), which still thematically makes sense.


It still allows an infinite number of long rests with minimal effort - personally I wouldn't call that an inconvenience, more a nuisance/annoyance.
There needs to be some real restriction to doing that - maybe respawning (nameless) enemies so that you loose a chunk of process (this would also require removing EXP gain from these "respawns" to avoid grinding). Given that 5e is balanced around the idea of dungeon crawls, I think this would be the most logical solution, even if restrictive to progression, however, would at the same time allow a lot more engagement - opportunities to try out new strategies and such.
How about diminishing returns for rests taken within x amount of time, kills, xp or new interactions from eachother? i believe allowing for a combination of any (which ever happens first) eliminates potential problems with parties getting stuck at boss/ final encounters with no other enemies to smite in order to trigger the full rest. Doing enough of any of those options in my mind would make a rest seem more beneficial.
I'm confused about people saying there is no limit to long rests. I've had several occasions in which the game told me it was not safe to rest here, so I had to leave a zone before being able to take a long rest. Did this not happen in your play throughs? I'm thiking maybe it was a bug that this feature simply didn't manifests in your safes for whatever reasons.

Personally I rather missed being able to have more than a single short rest. Two or three times I wanted to take a short rest and realized I was only allowed to take a long one.
Originally Posted by LizNuzz
Did this not happen in your play throughs?

Only happened to me once, when my party was surrounded by clouds of poison.
Now think what happens when they implement Sorcerer and you get access to multiple Fireballs every fight.
My humble question is: How?

I do not have a large game library to "prove my experience" in combat video games, but I like to think I'm not too shabby of a tactician. Most (not all, but most) fights kill my entire party several times. And even though I've hit the hihest archieveable level as of now, I still for the love of god cannot win the fight against the spider matriarch and her two accompaning phase spiders. This game, of course, leaves a lot to luck since everything is based on dice rolls, but still...
Care to share your superior game combat knowledge?
Originally Posted by LizNuzz
My humble question is: How?

I do not have a large game library to "prove my experience" in combat video games, but I like to think I'm not too shabby of a tactician. Most (not all, but most) fights kill my entire party several times. And even though I've hit the hihest archieveable level as of now, I still for the love of god cannot win the fight against the spider matriarch and her two accompaning phase spiders. This game, of course, leaves a lot to luck since everything is based on dice rolls, but still...
Care to share your superior game combat knowledge?


I pulled the Spider fight off at level 3 without any prior knowledge or preparation, but it was a nailbiter. There was a lot of shoving, pushing and shooting web-bridges involved laugh
Mobility, versatility and environmental awareness are generally the key points for controlling an engagement. Lots of people make the mistake to commit to a crappy position and just hope they can brute force the enemy to death but that won't work if you're at a tactical disadvantage.

As for topic: I feel like increasing the game resource drain somehow, limiting long rest opportunities somehow, and making more than 1 short rest possible in-between long rests are the 3 key points to balancing out the resources/encounters/rest balance. Maybe difficulty levels will help too.
Originally Posted by LizNuzz

I still for the love of god cannot win the fight against the spider matriarch and her two accompaning phase spiders. This game, of course, leaves a lot to luck since everything is based on dice rolls, but still... Care to share your superior game combat knowledge?

My party did it at level 3.
I hide my party behind a rock, spider matriarch jumped to them. Few magic missiles, fire bolts, sword smashes and she was dead.

edit: In tactic based combat games it's important that sometimes it's not you who have to go to the enemy. It's enemy that must come to you and be killed on your terms
1. Make sure to use expendables. A bunch of potions for big fights like that will make a difference.
2. I've seen people mention making use of the environment — I didn't d9 it, but burning spiderwebs is traditional in D&D...
3. I've got a ranger and picked a spider companion after facing tge first spiders. That plus Wyll's imp really helped keep the spawnwd spiderlings under control.
The toolbar has about every possible thing you need to play fights intelligently. Abuse the systems Larian has given us! To be fair, I always felt like I was playing DOS2 really stupidly.

- Positioning matters. Run away around an object.
- Know who has a reaction. Use that to pressure enemies instead of the other way around.
- You don't need to be at full health every fight (a tabletop DM will tell you when you can take a long rest).
- Characters can go down mid-fight. Use Help, a lot.
- Scout, hide, fight like a dishonorable fiend.

Players shouldn't need to rest as much as people are doing. Resting after every encounter is not helping you learn to use the systems as a whole, and combo effectively across the classes. I actually think I'm not resting enough, because I'm way behind on party character development.

I think a decent compromise might be to let players have a single low level spell slot back on a short rest. The wizards should still get their arcane recovery for higher levels.

Originally Posted by Ryllharu
The toolbar has about every possible thing you need to play fights intelligently. Abuse the systems Larian has given us! To be fair, I always felt like I was playing DOS2 really stupidly.

- Positioning matters. Run away around an object.
- Know who has a reaction. Use that to pressure enemies instead of the other way around.
- You don't need to be at full health every fight (a tabletop DM will tell you when you can take a long rest).
- Characters can go down mid-fight. Use Help, a lot.
- Scout, hide, fight like a dishonorable fiend.

Players shouldn't need to rest as much as people are doing. Resting after every encounter is not helping you learn to use the systems as a whole, and combo effectively across the classes. I actually think I'm not resting enough, because I'm way behind on party character development.

I think a decent compromise might be to let players have a single low level spell slot back on a short rest. The wizards should still get their arcane recovery for higher levels.



The problem is that the game really doesn't teach new players that they need to abuse the system. And personally I don't feel like that level of knowing and abusing the system should be necessary in the default difficulty of the game. Really, nothing is helping new players learn to use the systems and I think that's the biggest problem. I don't have much real experience with either 5e or Divinity: Original Sin 2 and so I'm trying to play this game like I'd play most any other cRPG on normal difficulty, which does not call for the level of tactical engagement you're describing.
Originally Posted by Gray Ghost
[quote=Ryllharu]The problem is that the game really doesn't teach new players that they need to abuse the system. And personally I don't feel like that level of knowing and abusing the system should be necessary in the default difficulty of the game. Really, nothing is helping new players learn to use the systems and I think that's the biggest problem. I don't have much real experience with either 5e or Divinity: Original Sin 2 and so I'm trying to play this game like I'd play most any other cRPG on normal difficulty, which does not call for the level of tactical engagement you're describing.

I think that's really the issue many have with the current build of the game.

The tutorial section is a great story intro, but it isn't the best D&D 5th Edition introduction. It gives the basics, which is fine, but the game as it stands doesn't do so well in showing the full extent of what it allows players to get away with. It's more of a "learn by failing" build.

5e 'Core Rules' is hard. It is brutally hard at low levels. 1st and 2nd level combat is actually the hardest the game gets, in my experience. Maybe right before wizards and sorcerers get 3rd Level Spells as well. Shadowheart has dialogue that points that out against your duo's first fight with the brains. A single hit can kill you. A few bad rolls in a row can mean a total party kill. It's happened to me a few times in BG3 so far, haha.

The more RTS style real time cRPGs or action RPGs from other developers rely much more on auto-attack cycles. Wiff and tank and then burn through all your abilities and then they'll cool down while the game plays itself a bit more.

You can't do that with 5e D&D. Every single action counts.

There's a lot of actions and choices BG3 offers, directly from 5e, ones that are replenishable by round, encounter, short rest, and finally long rest. If players are burning through all their long-rest abilities every time they're clearly not aware of how effective they can be with the "lesser" abilities.

As for why and when and who those "lesser" abilities are most effective, that's a deeper dive into the system question. The character sheet and tooltips should be making this clear to players not familiar with 5e.
The initial setting screams of timer to me, and I think a loose but hard limit to get rid of the tadpole would go a long way. Don't add any timer after that, because it seems to throw off so many people (I for one love them, it adds tension to games that too easily turn into checking zone after zone without thinking much but I can totally see how it can get frustrating) and allow people to backtrack to the initial zones and check elements that they missed and you'll kill two birds with one stone. After that though, the right balance is hard to strike. The supplies are nice in the first act of Pathfinder but it really quickly becomes irrelevant as you have enough money and carrying space to just max out and just forget about it, not even mentionning hunting while camping. The last option seems like the best option to me ; let us have something irrelevant to the plot but giving rewards if you can chain encouters quickly (without taking a 8 hours rest) like the camp getting better, a NPC giving you better items and so on. It would allow players to play at their own rythm if they like to fully rest after each fight but still give incentive to do without it.
If there is any rest limit added I really hope this will be optional. I dislike the combat and am playing for the story line and companions. Timers and having to lug around heavy pieces of wood (I don't play STR chars) in order to not 'cheese' fights (you could just not rest you know if you want things more difficult) just make me want to tear my hair out irl.

Originally Posted by Tuco

But hey, I'd be all for enforcing some restriction.
Except developers probably don't want to even attempt that sort of mechanic or they would be SIEGED by Kotaku and all the gaming press of people who can't play decently to save their life would cry about how elitism and gatekeeping are preventing them from having fun or something.

Luckily RPG fans and Kotaku readers don't have a lot of overlap. This nonsense hasn't exactly hurt the upsurge in classily hard games in recent years.


Originally Posted by Faulkner

The initial setting screams of timer to me, and I think a loose but hard limit to get rid of the tadpole would go a long way.

Agreed. I was surprised there was no cost to resting a lot for both gameplay and story reason.

Originally Posted by Moirnelithe

If there is any rest limit added I really hope this will be optional. I dislike the combat and am playing for the story line and companions..... you could just not rest you know if you want things more difficult
Having the opportunity cost of resting scale with difficulty is likely a requirement. There are plenty of players such as yourself that would hate to have some resource system breathing down their neck when trying to enjoy the story.

That being said. I hope you can understand that for people who want enjoy the challenge, having a mechanic that eases the game ruins the experience. Especially if you are required to use it to some extent to progress. It would be like playing Dark Souls where you can place a bonfire anywhere. It would completely undermine the sense of overcoming the game's challenge.
Originally Posted by LizNuzz
I'm confused about people saying there is no limit to long rests. I've had several occasions in which the game told me it was not safe to rest here, so I had to leave a zone before being able to take a long rest. Did this not happen in your play throughs? I'm thiking maybe it was a bug that this feature simply didn't manifests in your safes for whatever reasons.

Personally I rather missed being able to have more than a single short rest. Two or three times I wanted to take a short rest and realized I was only allowed to take a long one.


The moments that you are not allowed to rest are very few.
Why not just use the systems already in place for 5E to enforce long rests, so you don't have players running around like robots who never sleep? A day/night cycle to outdoor areas would ne nice, not only for knowing the passage of time in game, but also to allow for more stealth gameplay with nightfall, as well as giving the party exhaustion if they don't take a long rest once every X hours in game time? It would also allow for mid-day camp scenes, and let people know that yes, time is indeed passing in the game every time you rest, so you could have hidden timers for events if people rest too frequently, like some DM's do to prevent players from just resting after every encounter. For example you rest too much, and when you get to the goblin stronghold, they've already killed their prisoners and are marching out for their next raid. Rest too much after that and the results of that raid are randomly determined via multiple dicerolls, even could have the results regarding the prisoners in the fort be determined by several dicerolls as well, in the background while you're camping and taking your sweet time.

Personally any time I feel like I'm being rushed, I always make a beeline for the objectives, even when I'm not actually timed, so I was getting myself into a lot of difficult fights early on, however I still make sure not to use my resources frivolously, unless I'm planning on camping shortly. I usually only camp when it 'feels' right, meaning after enough events/fights have passed that I feel like could be done in a day, though that is immensely hard to determine without a day/night cycle represented. Do think you should be able to take multiple short rests between long rests though. It's kind of penalizing classes like Warlock and the martial classes because while they do benefit from long rests the same as the other classes, they don't *need* to take a long rest to recover their stuff, depending on their sub-type in some cases.
I haven't played enough BG3 yet to get a feel for long resting, but I'm in agreeance with @PumatsHole.Something like a day or night cycle would work better to convey the feeling of DnD. Even if it serves as a slight disconnect from the tadpole situation, I think it would benefit the gameplay in the long run.
Originally Posted by Burdock


Safety - DnD


for long rest (locations on the map, similar to fast travel portals)

Originally Posted by Burdock


Resources - Pathfinder Kingmaker, Darkest Dungeon


for short rest (food)

will be an ideal combination
Perhaps preventing the party from long resting while in a dungeon, cave or building (or anything alike, just not outside in the wild) would discourage people from resting after each encounter. Especially since there's no indoors/dungeon version of the camp location - it suggests the party does go outside to camp and head back inside once they're done.

Yes, people would still be able to move out of the dungeon to the surface to rest and head back in to the dungeon immediately after. I think it would at least discourage them to do so in larger areas. Perhaps they will now do 2-3 fights and use short rests in between before going to bed.

Another thing to disuade people from long rest spamming is giving players a slight buff or reward for only resting after a certain number of fights or with some decent playtime in between. Some sort of "well rested" bonus which you can only get after X amount of battles, quest progress, time played, ....
This could be some temporary hit points, slight XP boost, one re-roll of a d20, the 'aid' or 'bless' spell effect for a little while after resting, ... just some random ideas.
did anyone feel it was not needed to rest that often, with the power of food and potions and how cheep everything was.... i could go on forever without resting.
Originally Posted by Lord Branches
did anyone feel it was not needed to rest that often, with the power of food and potions and how cheep everything was.... i could go on forever without resting.

actually i'm finished EA with only 1 long rest, because there food is everywere not even use heal potions as for mage cantrips better than spells
Yes I had a similar experience. Somewhere after reaching lv 3 and after fighting the goblin attack outside the druid grove, the harpies and the owlbear I needed a long rest because I was all out of spell slots on Shadowheart and Gale. The party was almost full on HP at that point, but I wanted to be ready for a tough right if I happened to stumble into one. (Also I didnt even know food = healing I just used a potion every now and then.) XD
Instanced camping suck and the rest system suck and are poorly implemented, camping should take place in the main map, not an instanced zone, it detaches you form the story, and most of the problems I've had with the story breaking were at the camp, it doesn't bring the game together it somehow detaches it... Needs a complete overhaul.
I would combine the Safety and Resources options and add restrictions as to where and when you can set up your camp.

* Long AND Short should require resources - food, maybe some potions, etc
* Long rests should be allowed only in relatively safe areas. Say, not in caves, dungeons and behind enemy lines, no enemies in a certain radius or/and you should clean X enemy groups to be able to set camp in the area.
* In some cases - depending on your location and randomness factor - night attacks on your camp should occur.

Those factors should be quite limiting, especially if requirements for resources will be hefty and random attacks will be deadly...
5E has an issue with the balance between short rests and long rests. In PnP, the game is balanced around 2 short rests per long rest. With BG3 having food provide healing, resting gets ... weird. I like how they limited short rests between long rests, but it looks like that limitation is 1 short rest per long rest right now, which weakens fighters and warlocks compared to wizards and clerics.

Pillars of Eternity had a solid resting system. You had your HP, and you had a greater pool of 4x your HP that took damage at the same rate. Most healing healed your HP. Your HP healed at the end of each fight, so HP was during a fight. But that 4xHP pool (I forget what the pools were called) only healed on a rest, so you needed to rest eventually. You needed to use camping supplies to rest, and you could only carry 4 camping supplies with you, so you had a time limit to how long you could stay out before heading back to a town to buy more camping supplies. You also got bonuses from resting in town, and those bonuses only lasted for 2 rests.

Larian can't play with things too much, since they're tied to the D&D rules. But, the easiest thing to do is balance encounters as if players are fully rested going into each fight and then have them be fully rested going into each fight. That would require nerfing the long rest spell-casters, though, so that's a big change they probably can't make.
Curious, but why don't they just use the 5e rules? The camp is nice and all, for when you are in the wild. But when in a dungeon, or another location that is story wise, or battle wise of the grid what sense does it make if you can click the long rest and end up at your camp?

If they do leave it like that we need some teleportation spell, or another gimmick to make it thematically sound.

I for one would love to see it more like a table top session. You can rest anywhere, long or short, but you run the risk of an encounter. If you long rest in a dungeon, the chances of either being attacked, or afterwards being ambushed by half the dungeon should be possible. If you are outside, have a dynamic camp ready. Why does it have to be the exact same location? As if they would head back to the same spot, every time no matter where. It makes the world small.

It also makes clerics feel a lot less useful. Instead you can just bring another mage and blast away. Just heal after for spell slots and health.

Originally Posted by iril
Curious, but why don't they just use the 5e rules? The camp is nice and all, for when you are in the wild. But when in a dungeon, or another location that is story wise, or battle wise of the grid what sense does it make if you can click the long rest and end up at your camp?

If they do leave it like that we need some teleportation spell, or another gimmick to make it thematically sound.

I for one would love to see it more like a table top session. You can rest anywhere, long or short, but you run the risk of an encounter. If you long rest in a dungeon, the chances of either being attacked, or afterwards being ambushed by half the dungeon should be possible. If you are outside, have a dynamic camp ready. Why does it have to be the exact same location? As if they would head back to the same spot, every time no matter where. It makes the world small.

It also makes clerics feel a lot less useful. Instead you can just bring another mage and blast away. Just heal after for spell slots and health.




The problem with "long rest could result in an encounter" is that you could end up with a save file that is stuck in a lose/lose situation. You could be out of resources, out of health, out of spell slots, and need to rest, and then just be stuck save scumming for a long rest without an encounter.

I 100% agree though! Teleporting to camp, especially without a story explanation for how (if it was some brain tadpole power, sure, maybe, whatever, but at least hang a lantern on it, I rested inside the temple when the goblins were hostile outside, there was no walking out of there).
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