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Topic: Useless gaming news & chatter (Read 1502731 times)
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ezrast
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2125
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Strangely, I found more decent uniques while leveling than I can ever remember getting in previous leagues (largely but not entirely thanks to the buffs they gave to a lot of trash leveling uniques). I do keep running out of alchs, but I'm in SSF so other currency shortages haven't really registered.
My problem with the game right now (and for the past couple years) is how wildly unpredictable and inconsistent the tuning is. I'm all for a slower game, and don't care much where the difficulty/loot curves land in absolute terms, but in their efforts to improve pacing GGG has entirely forgotten that mobs other than rares exist. So a typical map is 90% wading through trash that disintegrates the moment I glance at it sideways, 5% reasonably-tuned fights against strong rares, and 5% archnemesis combos that either wreck me or are brick walls not worth killing.
Most of my defenses are solid, but my chaos resistance is crap until I can find some upgrades. And that would be a great goal to work towards if the consequences were, say, that I can't deal with Al-Hezmin mobs so I fall behind on certain atlas/conqueror progress until I get the hole patched. But what actually happens is no matter where I go, sometimes a Chaos Weaver or Toxic shows up when I'm not paying attention for one second - because nothing else in the zone can hurt me - and I get popped. There's no playing around the weakness at the strategic level short of auto-piloting through T3's until I happen to ID the right rare.
White mobs may as well not exist. They could delete them from maps and just have the client render a stream of skeletons that explode the moment you move or use any ability. Players wouldn't notice and they'd save a bundle on server CPU costs. Could give themselves a bonus.
For some reason I still get hype for every league but then it takes me about 3 days to remember that as much as I used to love the game, it's just not that fun for me anymore - especially now that Last Epoch is right there. Maybe PoE 2 will fix it.
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Bah, had H:ZD for 70% off in my cart at GMG and had to head out to lunch. Came back from lunch, keys sold out
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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It's $3.30 more expensive on Steam directly. I'm sure you can afford that.
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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It's $3.30 more expensive on Steam directly. I'm sure you can afford that.
$5 more for me with code I've already played it and all the DLC on PS4, so I'm willing to wait until it's on a similar sale in the future.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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RTX 40 series officially announced: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/40-series/Reveal: https://youtu.be/PWcNlRI00jo (first 20 minutes is RTX 40-specific stuff) tl;dr/dw: The 40 series GPUs are on TSMC's 4nm process vs the 30 series Samsung 8nm process. So almost all the non-RT performance gains are from the process shrink by running at ~2x clock speeds with approximately the same power draw (or less) with up to 2x non-RT rasterization performance (~1.5x probably more typical). RT performance is up ~2x from the new architecture so up to 4x with both the new architecture and clock speed boosts combined (~3x probably more typical). RTX 4090 (24 GB) $1599 RTX 4080 16 GB $1199 RTX 4080 12 GB $899 The RTX 4080 16 GB really should be the RTX 4080 Ti since it has a lot more CUDA cores than the RTX 4080 12 GB. I.e. you are paying $300 for ~22% more CUDA cores as well as the extra 4 GB of RAM. RTX 30 series price reference: RTX 3090 (24 GB) $1499 RTX 3080 Ti (12 GB) $1199 (release price), $899 (current price) RTX 3080 (10 GB) $699 Yes the RTX 3080 Ti was ridiculously overpriced for a long long time given the small increase in performance over the regular 3080. So the 40 series pricing looks entirely reasonable given the significant jump in performance. Power, again, is not an issue as the new cards are either the same or lower than their 30 series counterparts.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60350
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The real problem is there's no reason whatsoever to ugprade if you're even on 20XX series, and def not if you're on 30XX series.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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My 4K 144 Hz monitor says otherwise Edit: also with RT now becoming a real thing there's a big big difference in RT performance between the 20, 30, and presumably 40 series cards.
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« Last Edit: September 20, 2022, 12:09:31 PM by Trippy »
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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My tv is only 60Hz@4k and for quality images (not just RT) it pushes my 3090 too hard. I play some stuff at 1440p. I'd be ok flipping my 3090 for a 4080 16GB.
Glad to see they've sorted out the power thing, but it's still a huge power draw (another reason I prefer having a higher bin, to get better performance with less power draw). It'll bump close to 400W (390 iirc) if I don't throttle it (to 300W).
If upscaling were a bit more supported, probably wouldn't be quite as much of an issue, but at that size 4k is noticeably crisper even on well-supported DLSS titles.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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RTX 4090 (24 GB) $1599 RTX 4080 16 GB $1199 RTX 4080 12 GB $899
There's no FE edition for the RTX 4080 12 GB so $899 is a "starting at" price.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60350
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Out of curiosity, what kind of person would be ok spending $900 but not $1200 at that point? Or even just eh $1600 to blow it out for five years? The entire line seems poorly and awkwardly placed.
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Velorath
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Out of curiosity, what kind of person would be ok spending $900 but not $1200 at that point? Or even just eh $1600 to blow it out for five years? The entire line seems poorly and awkwardly placed.
I’ve got a couple months to decide at least, assuming it’s possible to get any of them. Raptor Lake is supposed to drop around the end of October also. Honestly at this stage in my life I’d rather get a pre-built if possible, but I guess I’ll see what’s available.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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Out of curiosity, what kind of person would be ok spending $900 but not $1200 at that point? Or even just eh $1600 to blow it out for five years? The entire line seems poorly and awkwardly placed.
$600 is $600 (the delta between low and high) -- not everybody has that much disposable income. I do agree the pricing is awkward with the 3080 12 GB being too high, especially given it's likely there won't be many boards at that $899 price point since there's no FE card, i.e. the pricing will be more like: RTX 4090 (24 GB) $1599 RTX 4080 16 GB $1199 RTX 4080 12 GB $999 At that point with only $200 difference and much better specs on the 16 GB* the 12 GB doesn't make much sense. More sensical would have been to have a FE 4080 12 GB and space them $400 apart: RTX 4090 (24 GB) $1599 RTX 4080 16 GB $1199 RTX 4080 12 GB $799 I.e. except for 4080 16 GB which matches the 3080 Ti initial pricing the new cards would be $100 more than the 30 series cards but offer significantly more performance. That seems reasonable** to me. * the 12 GB also has less memory bandwidth (192-bit vs 256-bit memory bus) than the 16 GB, in addition to fewer CUDA cores and less memory ** In a world were ~$1500 for the top-end GPU is "reasonable"
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Is there some limit to effectiveness of memory bandwidth? I've seen (and had, the 8800) some 384 bit interfaces, but my first 256 bit interface card was a 9700 pro back in the early aughts. Seems odd how everything else seems to have ballooned, but not that. I do remember the 9700 pro being a really amazing card, in part to that interface.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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Yes you can have too much memory bandwidth as in you can fill it faster than the GPU can process the data in it. E.g. the 40 series actually have narrower memory buses (256 and 192 bit) than the comparable 30 series (384 and 320 bit) but the clock speeds are much faster in the 40s so I’m assuming the memory bandwidth should be about the same or more in the 40s.
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Looks like they're feature-blocking DLSS 3 from older gen cards. Ugh. Ironically, the 4000 series should be in least need of DLSS.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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Yes you can have too much memory bandwidth as in you can fill it faster than the GPU can process the data in it. E.g. the 40 series actually have narrower memory buses (256 and 192 bit) than the comparable 30 series (384 and 320 bit) but the clock speeds are much faster in the 40s so I’m assuming the memory bandwidth should be about the same or more in the 40s.
NVIDIA's site doesn't list memory clock speeds and memory bandwidth but I found some numbers on www.techpowerup.com though I have no idea how accurate they are. I was wrong about the clock speeds (assuming techpowerup.com is correct) -- the GPU clock speeds are significantly higher in the 40 series but the memory clock speeds are only slightly higher so they don't necessarily offset the narrower memory buses. So both RTX 4080s have lower memory bandwidth numbers compared to their corresponding RTX 3080s. GPU | Memory clock | Effective Gbps | Memory size | Memory type | Memory bus | Memory bandwidth | RTX 4090 | 1325 MHz | 21.2 Gbps | 24 GB | GDDR6X | 384 bit | 1,018 GB/s | RTX 4080 16 GB | 1437 MHz | 23 Gbps | 16 GB | GDDR6X | 256 bit | 735.7 GB/s | RTX 4080 12 GB | 1312 MHz | 21 Gbps | 12 GB | GDDR6X | 192 bit | 503.8 GB/s | RTX 3090 | 1219 MHz | 19.5 Gbps | 24 GB | GDDR6X | 384 bit | 936.2 GB/s | RTX 3080 Ti | 1188 MHz | 19 Gbps | 12 GB | GDDR6X | 384 bit | 912.4 GB/s | RTX 3080 | 1188 MHz | 19 Gbps | 10 GB | GDDR6X | 320 bit | 760.3 GB/s | RTX 3070 | 1750 MHz | 14 Gbps | 8 GB | GDDR6 | 256 bit | 448.0 GB/s |
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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I wonder how the 4080 running gddr6x 200MHz faster than the 3090 that already runs wicked hot is going to work out (esp for 200GB/s less bandwidth?). I still feel like nvidia has a power/thermal issue they need to address in their designs.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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I haven’t seen any tear downs of 40 series cards yet but I’m assuming there will be more robust cooling for those chips — i.e something better than just thick thermal pads that contact the plate of the fin stack.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15188
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Gotta give Google this, when they decide something is done as an experiment or whatever, it's fucking done. I'm not sure that any of them realize that this is a pretty strong limit condition on new people saying "oh look Google has a new thing they are doing, let's try it."
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Count Nerfedalot
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1041
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I'm certainly not in any hurry to jump on the bandwagon for any more Google products. Ever. I mean I have an Android phone and use Google apps and stuff on it as well as the web apps. But with the full expectation that whatever I use/need the most will be discontinued when it's most inconvenient. Certainly no SAS stuff with a paid subscription like the horribly named but fantastically well done "Google Play Music".
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Yes, I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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I mentioned the Stadia thing to the old lady and she immediately went on a rant about Google Play Music. We both had extensive collections uploaded, neither of us bothered to move it to youtube. I forgot how salty I was about it, too. Fuck Google. Said as I implement collaborative google tools for our trustees
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Count Nerfedalot
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1041
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Yeah, I tried Youtube Music for the free trial and said "Nope". I ended up with Spotify as the lesser of many evils but I'm really not happy with it either. Does anyone know if Amazon music is any good? I heard it had a really limited selection in a lot of areas. I'm really not in to pop fizzy pablum
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Yes, I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Licensing comes and goes on Amazon Music, it's not reliable that your favorite albums will be available. I don't think that's any different than any other streaming service with licensing, though. Going through a couple random lists, the only unavailable tune I see is a Sleep tune, though another tune from the same album is still available on the list.
Music licensing is hot garbage (part of why Rocksmith+ sucks). But in the case of Amazon Music, it's been, eh, fine.
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« Last Edit: September 30, 2022, 07:17:03 AM by Sky »
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15188
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It's kind of insane. We learned this: people want the music they want in the way they want it, they don't want it by the album unless the creator is fucking amazing and can deliver a whole coherent album. But the industry (and most artists) learned the wrong lesson, which was "they just want to steal everything, crush it all". Then Jobs comes along and says "look, see, people will pay money if you just give them the music the way they want it". Only he gets socked with DRM and his own control-freakery so that if you buy iTunes shit it's locked up on their device (which they stop supporting eventually) and the expectation becomes "if you want to 'own' it, we'll make you rebuy it constantly". So then we all say ok fine, we'll buy a streaming service. And then they just balkanize up again and fight what people want.
You tell me the price of listening to everything I want to listen to is a lot, if we want people to get paid off? I might be down with that. Might be better than some of the shit I pay for. You want to tell me that it's a lot but oh wait we just lost half the licenses or oh wait we have this degraded fucking technical standard that makes the music sound like shit or wait you have to listen to ads first despite this costing a lot? Fuck all of you. You paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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Apple removed the copy / transfer DRM on iTunes songs more than a decade ago (2009). There's still a watermark on the files, I think, but you can make as many copies as you want and transfer it wherever you want.
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HaemishM
Staff Emeritus
Posts: 42660
the Confederate flag underneath the stone in my class ring
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I don't really blame the artists (obviously). They just want to get fucking paid for their work like anyone else. The record labels are more of the villain than even the streaming services. Both suck but for pure evil, it's also obvious that the record labels and large copyright holders are the vampiric bastards stifling the music industry and shoving every anti-consumer idea they can find down our throats. What makes them so evil is the one tool that have that's completely fucked - copyright law.
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Soulflame
Terracotta Army
Posts: 6487
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RIP Overwatch.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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It’s amazing how quickly Blizzard killed Overwatch by prematurely announcing Overwatch 2 and stopping development on OW, going from GotY and a robust professional league to effectively dead in three years.
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Kail
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2858
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It’s amazing how quickly Blizzard killed Overwatch by prematurely announcing Overwatch 2 and stopping development on OW, going from GotY and a robust professional league to effectively dead in three years.
The robust professional league was one of the main reasons I stopped playing. I haven't seen anything that kills communities faster than pro gamers, and Blizzard has been hell bent on shoving them in to every game since Starcraft, no matter how casual. I was massively enjoying Overwatch in the beta and early release, but the focus on e-sports (and loot boxes) killed 75% of the fun of the game for me. Would be nice if Overwatch 2 could bring some of that back, but between their hijinks in the original game and the whole workplace harassment lawsuit thing, I'm having trouble justifying even downloading it.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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Riot and League of Legends would disagree? I believe it's the most popular it's ever been right now. I do agree that games that focus on balancing the competitive scene can turn off more casual players as nobody likes it when their favorite hero or heroes are nerfed and "casual" / non-ranked matchmaking can be problematic, not to mention all the same-team toxicity competitive team-based games engender, but some studios and games have somehow managed to do it so it is possible.
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Kail
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2858
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I'm probably being too idiosyncratic, but LoL is basically like the poster example of what I would point to as a shitty community. Regardless of how successful it is from a financial point of view, the community is largely not made of people I want to play with, and as a result, I drift away from the game, regardless of how much I WANT to enjoy it. Overwatch is the same. In beta (as with a lot of smaller communities) it was pretty fun and the mood was very positive. As soon as the game released and professional Overwatch became a thing, though, that evaporated, and everyone was convinced they were going to be the next Overwatch superstar, and their incompetent teammates were the reason that wasn't happening.
Might be just rose colored glasses, but I've seen it happen with a lot of "e-sports" games, and it's one of the major reasons I rarely play anything multiplayer anymore. Might just be me getting old, too, though, who knows. Maybe this has been happening the whole time and I just never noticed it.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23638
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Playing PUG ranked mode(s) inevitably becomes toxic over time once you get past the newbie ranks because people don't like deranking or getting stuck in their current rank because of perceived bad play by their teammates. This is true in any competitive team-based PvP game. I like team-based MP too but for PvP games I usually only play larger-scale team games like Battlefield where having one extra mediocre (at best) player isn't likely going to make or break a team's chances. For small team games I play PvE games like Deep Rock Galactic, World War Z and Back 4 Blood (and waiting patiently for WH40K: Darktide) cause I don't like being yelled by some sweaty-try-hard-no-lifer-living-in-their-parents-basement either.
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19289
sentient yeast infection
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I had the revelation at some point while listening to some shrieking try-hard in Overwatch that nobody had ever said anything in voice chat in that game that made me glad that voice chat existed (like, genuinely useful tactical information, clever asides, anything like that), and it had all just been mouth breathing and shrieking. So I muted it and the game got more fun.
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Sky
Terracotta Army
Posts: 32117
I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.
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Pubs, man.
When I was doing competitive Battlefield, team chat was amazing. Hell, just being the designated pilot, getting in a plane and using it properly, was revelatory in league play. Everyone taking a role and actually working together as a team.
But it made me realize how shitty pubs were and I basically stayed away from multiplayer after that. We did have some fun after matches or practice, just invading a pub server and destroying all the horrible spawn campers/plane squatters/"snipers"/etc.
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