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You’re twisting my words there quite a bit, nobody is saying that representation isn’t important or that LGBT people aren’t either.

I came into this thread to explain that we understand your frustration that the project needs is our job to do and that has time spent on as a higher focus than mod support.

I could have not responded to this thread given that we’d already answered elsewhere, but I felt we owed it to people to have open communication since that is something we love of our community.

But I also don’t then think it’s unreasonable for me to expect people to not respond to that with hyperbole or thinly veiled implications that I or the rest of the team are anti LGBT, which is especially ludicrous given that our team has LGBT people in it (which is by no means a limit on other people caring about this too) and we’ve worked to improve representation in CK3 since it’s something a lot of us care about.

I know this response will probably also get me more disagrees and angry faces, but I came into this thread in my free time to be open with people so it didn’t seem like we were ignoring you even if I couldn’t come with an answer that would fix the problems for you. So I’d ask that whilst this is an important and sensitive topic to try and not twist our answers here into something they are clearly not.

I've reread my post and I just want to apologize. It's an extremely personal topic and it's easy to get emotional. I for sure went too far. No excuses. And I just really want to stress that I'm genuinely grateful you chose to post in this thread tonight. Thank you.

Just to be clear, I don't think anyone here truly believes that you guys are anything other than well-meaning. It's just that for queer people it's a common lived experience to 'fall through the cracks', so to speak, in terms of representation, particularly in video games. Same-sex love-interests often get cut in RPGs due to time constraints (or even worse, due to censorship in a foreign market), or have less work put into them than their counterparts, or there are simply far less options. I assume something like this is what happened here on account of the realities of corporate budgets, deadlines, priorities, etc.

That's basically what was eating at me. Again though, I'm sorry for the way I brought it across.
 
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This is going to come off as dickish, but you probably need to hear it.

Paradox is now a publicly traded company. They have a board, and a ceo and all that jazz, and those people have what is called a fiduciary responsibility to make money above anything that isn't explicitly illegal. Democraphically, LGBQT+ people account for what? Maybe 5% of the population? It's in that ball park. This, by definition, makes the allocation of resources towards a very niche group in a for profit product low priority.

This obviously isn't what you want to hear, but that's the reality of capitalism.

Why was this hardcoded? If I had to guess, it was easier for them to block it from happening, than to add the code required to make sure you couldn't destroy the AI by sending them same sex concubines. That's just a guess.

Will it get changed? Probably. When? The jaded version of myself says, in about 4 years when Paradox finally decides to teach the AI how to play the game again after 18 DLCs :) Precedent is Stellaris, and HOI4, and well, basically all their recent games where AI at all levels is left behind by new DLC and it takes dedicated patching to catch the games ability to play itself competently to the DLC.
It certainly came off as dickish. It is reductionist. If the issue is sending off concubines and consorts then it only had to do a check it already did for lover issues - is this person attracted to this sex? If not, turn it down. You can even add a further, sloppy, restrictive check of A) am I openly a sodomite? or B) is same sex relations accepted in my religion?

And capitalism is full of nasty features - but that includes making that 5% happy if it's something nice and cheap like adding 3 checks in. It also means that they will be responsive to people being upset because those are potentially lost sales on future expansions and lost sales on referrals with a PR scandal - and the PR costs are much higher than that of adding in a 3 point check.

Of course, the real issue is that the number of potential customers that either explicitly want this or care enough that they want LGBTQIA people to have access to it solidly outnumbers the ptoential customers that would want it gone. Decent people potential sales > Bigot potential sales. Moreover, those bigots also highly correlate with the people who are never satisfied and aren't going to be happy regardless of what is done. Companies want the decent majority's business unless they're going for a niche market - which they would only do if they had some serious competition and no one else has games comparable to Paradox.


You’re twisting my words there quite a bit, nobody is saying that representation isn’t important or that LGBT people aren’t either.

I came into this thread to explain that we understand your frustration that the project needs is our job to do and that has time spent on as a higher focus than mod support.

I could have not responded to this thread given that we’d already answered elsewhere, but I felt we owed it to people to have open communication since that is something we love of our community.

But I also don’t then think it’s unreasonable for me to expect people to not respond to that with hyperbole or thinly veiled implications that I or the rest of the team are anti LGBT, which is especially ludicrous given that our team has LGBT people in it (which is by no means a limit on other people caring about this too) and we’ve worked to improve representation in CK3 since it’s something a lot of us care about.

I know this response will probably also get me more disagrees and angry faces, but I came into this thread in my free time to be open with people so it didn’t seem like we were ignoring you even if I couldn’t come with an answer that would fix the problems for you. So I’d ask that whilst this is an important and sensitive topic to try and not twist our answers here into something they are clearly not.
Your problem is that you are not dealing with people simply wanting a new feature - they're upset because a feature that already exists was taken away. My impression of what you said previously was that you believed it to be to bug issues based on complete supposition, not that you knew that was the actual issue. If it were, which modders do not believe, you are putting the priority based upon the time it takes to deal with the bug reports that seem to be autogenerated - which is people that the company has to pay to do the job of going through them. It is a man hours issue. However, the proper solution was not to hardcode heterosexism into the game, but rather to fix the bug reporter so that it doesn't falsely report bugs where they don't actually exist. Moreover, because it was something that was there, that the community put in free man hours to make available, and you took it away - it has become a PR issue. That might change the priorities because PR issues usually appear far ahead of modding requests.
 
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I've reread my post and I just want to apologize. It's an extremely personal topic and it's easy to get emotional. I for sure went too far. No excuses. And I just really want to stress that I'm sincerely grateful you chose to post in this thread tonight. Thank you.

Just to be clear, I don't think anyone here truly believes that you guys are anything other than well-meaning. It's just that for queer people it's a common lived experience to 'fall through the cracks', so to speak, in many video games. Same-sex love-interests often get cut in RPGs due to time constraints (in the best case, sometimes its due to censorship in a foreign market), or have less work put into them than their counterparts, or there are simply far less options. I assume something like this is what happened here on account of the realities of corporate budgets, deadlines, etc.

That's basically what was eating at me. Again though, I'm sorry for the way I brought it across.
I appreciate the apology, and honestly no hard feelings.
This is an important and personal topic for a lot of people and I get that shooting me as the messenger when I come without the desired answer is easy to do when people are frustrated!

I am gonna try and head off to sleep now since it is midnight and I do have work tomorrow, I’ll check on this thread tomorrow morning though I doubt I will have much else to add than what I’ve already said. We do see you and the frustration, I can’t promise a fix for X given date but it is something we are definitely aware of and do want to change once we get the time.
 
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I am gonna try and head off to sleep now since it is midnight and I do have work tomorrow, I’ll check on this thread tomorrow morning though I doubt I will have much else to add than what I’ve already said. We do see you and the frustration, I can’t promise a fix for X given date but it is something we are definitely aware of and do want to change once we get the time.

If the intent is to put it off rather than issuing a hotfix, I would strongly suggest doing so with more story events involving concubines and consorts - make them much more intimate. I'm not devastated that they're gone since there isn't much concubines and consorts do other than provide babies which same sex ones cannot do - though it might work if we could have trans characters introduced in with the return (and the stress system could do wonders for raising awareness of the stress of being closeted for characters who haven't come out into the open) who can reproduce with cis counterparts of the same gender. If mythical aspects are reintroduced, there is a lot you can do to make it work right for that. But it is still upsetting as I often made characters take same sex concubines as an internal roleplaying aspect. It was a bit odd that they sometimes thought they were the father of the other's pregnancy given that they're two cis women with no means of impregnating one another. If some more meaning through connecting with them on the regular is implemented, it may come off as worth the wait. Perhaps with all sorts of familial interactions, such as actively assisting children grow their skills.
 
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Well on a different note. I'm curious since this channel has new vigor. What do people think of a mod that adds gay marriage for the player only? This would be much easier to implement and test then having a full gay marriage simulated by the ai.

As a personal failing I haven't had much luck in making or allowing the ai to do anything.
 
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If this is something that the dev team wants, and if players were already able to achieve something similar on our own, I'd really just like to understand why same-sex concubinage was treated as a bug. If it's something you want in the game but haven't implemented, how is players being able to implement it a bug? Why actively add hard code to the game to stop players from doing it? These sound like rhetorical questions, I know, but I genuinely want to understand the rationale here.

I also don't really understand the response to the question of why the hard code preventing marriage wasn't removed or why it was added to begin with. Yeah, mods might produce bugs. They often do. They're mods - why does Paradox care if players can implement something buggy in this case, but not in the case of every other buggy mod? Why is the softcode check not sufficient to stop bugs related to same-sex marriage from appearing in the base game?

I appreciate the fact that we're getting a response. I just feel like this patch raises more questions than the response answers.
 
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If this is something that the dev team wants, and if players were already able to achieve something similar on our own, I'd really just like to understand why same-sex concubinage was treated as a bug. If it's something you want in the game but haven't implemented, how is players being able to implement it a bug? Why actively add hard code to the game to stop players from doing it? These sound like rhetorical questions, I know, but I genuinely want to understand the rationale here.

I also don't really understand the response to the question of why the hard code preventing marriage wasn't removed. Yeah, mods might produce bugs. They often do. They're mods - why does Paradox care if players can implement something buggy in this case, but not in the case of every other buggy mod? Why is the softcode check not sufficient to stop bugs related to same-sex marriage from appearing in the base game?
Hello, I don't want to put words in paradox's mouth. But likely early on it was hard coded for a variety of reason but mostly to make it easier to develop. Then a lot of the stuff was built on top of that. Most importantly the code as writen doesn't allow for taking in the oposite gender. The father position can never be female and the mother postion can never be male. I would guess at one point they had an issue with all kinds of strange relationships happening in the early day and solidly locked up the problem with the hard code.

Either way since it IS coded this way whether it should have been or not everything below and above is writen with the expectectation that male is father and female is mother. Making changing it not so easy as some people think.

On the concubine thing I heard that there were strange relationship things happening in peoples games. Like a concubine thinking they are the mother of the main wife's kid. So some one probably reported this as a bug. The easiest fix is hardcoding. Or perhaps the concubine being blocked now is a bug in it self from some other fix.
 
Well, if they don't procreate anyway, this isn't an issue.
It's not about the procreation. It's about the code. If everything is written with the expectation of the sex in the marriage it means that everything connected it needs to be rewritten. That would be a lot of work and testing. I've said this a few times but it doesn't matter if it shouldn't have been written like that. It's in the past and we can't change it. So now it will be a lot of work to fix.
 
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I feel a lot of peoples frustrations.

The thing that started me modding in CK3 was my attempt to add gay marriage to the game. I added a new doctrine level called celebrated, so I could reform religions to allow same sex marriage. For me personally fit well into my view of what the religion reformation mechanics where for, to give you the freedom to change societies views on things. Found out it was hard coded against, but that it still worked for concubines. Then I decided to apply this concept of "celebrated" to all the crime doctrines, so that way you could have a difference between accepted (i.e. not persecuted) and celebrated (i.e. actually supported). I've been working on fleshing out what that would mean for all the crimes doctrines (been slow at it as I should be actually working on my thesis), but always with the intention that gay marriage would be the Same-Sex Celebrated doctrine's effect (and same-sex concubines being the stand in for now). I even spent the time to get all my concubine code updated for the new patch, plus add some new opinion modifiers; before realizing it was hard coded against. So, now I'm left with a mod that has an effect for the celebrated version of every crime doctrine, except the one I actually care about.

This didn't really have a point, just wanted to share with someone. Also I want to add that I don't think Paradox did this intentionally; in fact, I'm sure they'd rather it be possible. But that doesn't mean it isn't still a sad turn of events for me personally.

But I am also glad the dev team seems to recognize this as an issue (and thanks @blackninja9939 for taking the time to respond to this thread, it means a lot to me:) ). And while I wish it would be a higher priority, I can totally understand that modding, in general, is low priority.

So, optimistically looking forward to when I can go back to creating my gay celebrating religions (without having to revert back to an old version of the game, and loose out on all the new goodies). Hopefully it won't be too long.

As an author of a mod that utilized same-sex concubines, I'm a bit hesitant about this sort of answer because I frequently checked my logs (and the game) for errors when making sure it all ran correctly, and I certainly never noticed anything directly related to it (I needed to add some additional checks for niche cases due to how I implemented it, but that was it). It was certainly close enough to "working" such that I noticed no problems during a couple of hundred in-game years where both myself and the AI made use of the feature.
While my mod adding same-sex concubines did have errors, they were do to my doings (it was my first major foray into modding CK3). Though I did eventually get my mod to run without error before the new patch came out. And as far as I could tell the mod was working as intended. But that's I think the issue. We, as modders, don't have the same level of feedback that Paradox does, so we might not realize the script is causing an error in some edge case (and even a really small percentage edge case can represent thousands of players for Paradox). Plus, not all errors are going to show in the log, some are going to require players to point them out with bug reports.

If this is something that the dev team wants, and if players were already able to achieve something similar on our own, I'd really just like to understand why same-sex concubinage was treated as a bug. If it's something you want in the game but haven't implemented, how is players being able to implement it a bug? Why actively add hard code to the game to stop players from doing it? These sound like rhetorical questions, I know, but I genuinely want to understand the rationale here.

I also don't really understand the response to the question of why the hard code preventing marriage wasn't removed or why it was added to begin with. Yeah, mods might produce bugs. They often do. They're mods - why does Paradox care if players can implement something buggy in this case, but not in the case of every other buggy mod? Why is the softcode check not sufficient to stop bugs related to same-sex marriage from appearing in the base game?

I appreciate the fact that we're getting a response. I just feel like this patch raises more questions than the response answers.
I have no evidence for this. But my personal guess is that there were circumstance where the code, when getting a new concubine, needed to checked for the requirements of being a concubine. But this code would bypass or not properly evaluate the script, thus causing it to give a faulty results. That result proabably being that it allowed a concubine to go through that shouldn't (not necessarily related to same-sex, or at least exclusively). Thus they decided to hard-code the requirements to stop these leaks (maybe even with the idea that this was a temporary fix). And when doing so copied all the in game requirements to this new hard-coded check with opposite-sex being one of the requirements and thus added in with the rest.

When someone struggling with their identity gets ahold of a role-playing game it often helps them figure things out. I've honestly seen more posts than I'd have expected from other queer people on social media mentioning how games like the Sims were one of their few outlets to express their sexuality or gender identity when they were still in the closet.
I remember doing this way back in the first Sims game when I was a kid.
 
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It's not about the procreation. It's about the code. If everything is written with the expectation of the sex in the marriage it means that everything connected it needs to be rewritten. That would be a lot of work and testing. I've said this a few times but it doesn't matter if it shouldn't have been written like that. It's in the past and we can't change it. So now it will be a lot of work to fix.
Do you have access to Paradox's code to know this? Mother and father aren't necessarily married and using debug codes you literally can make one woman impregnate another woman - as well as have dead characters impregnate living ones - so I'm pretty sure that isn't the case. The initiator is the father and the object is the mother.

"pregnancy <impregnating person coded as father> <impregnated person coded as mother>"

There might need to be a small change in same sex marriage, but that's as simple as making the person proposing in the first spot and person who is receiving the proposal in the second spot.
 
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Do you have access to Paradox's code to know this? Mother and father aren't necessarily married and using debug codes you literally can make one woman impregnate another woman - as well as have dead characters impregnate living ones - so I'm pretty sure that isn't the case. The initiator is the father and the object is the mother.

"pregnancy <impregnating person coded as father> <impregnated person coded as mother>"

There might need to be a small change in same sex marriage, but that's as simple as making the person proposing in the first spot and person who is receiving the proposal in the second spot.
I don't know. But you don't know either. I take them at their word when they say that it is hard and a lot of work to change. If this is the case my scenario is the most likely. I made lesbians give birth on the first day of the game release so you don't need to tell me. If you go back early in the thread I even talk about it. It creates a clone with dna problems though.

I guess the difference between you and me is that I don't believe that Paradox would not give us what we want just to fuck with us. I don't believe they hate gay marriage or have any negative feelings towards those of us who want it.
 
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I certainly don't think they consciously feel that way. But at the same time, this incident shows that supporting gay people is lower on their priority list than streamlining their debug process. And that they're willing to make an active change that supports the debug process at the expense of gay support. Which is not exactly an encouraging thought. It's like mettpawwz said -- things always slip through the cracks, or get made low priorities, or get dismissed as unimportant, and that just keeps on chipping away at gay people in a thousand tiny ways. Nothing overt, not even anything actively malicious, but it still adds up into a very unpleasant feeling.

I absolutely believe that nobody at Paradox is a driven raving homophobe or anything like that, and that they all would say they totally support gay rights. But there's all sorts of things it's easy for a person to overlook if it doesn't directly affect them. And it's easy to get defensive when someone points them out -- 'I'm not a bigot! How dare they accuse me of doing bigoted things by accident?'
 
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While my mod adding same-sex concubines did have errors, they were do to my doings (it was my first major foray into modding CK3). Though I did eventually get my mod to run without error before the new patch came out. And as far as I could tell the mod was working as intended. But that's I think the issue. We, as modders, don't have the same level of feedback that Paradox does, so we might not realize the script is causing an error in some edge case (and even a really small percentage edge case can represent thousands of players for Paradox). Plus, not all errors are going to show in the log, some are going to require players to point them out with bug reports.
I meant to word my post in a way that acknowledged as much, yes. Of course modders don't see everything going on that the Paradox team does. Still, I remain dubious that this was the best solution to the problem. Certainly, going by what I understood of the code, it wouldn't seem to be. I accept that I may be wrong on this, based on things I can't possibly know.
 
I meant to word my post in a way that acknowledged as much, yes. Of course modders don't see everything going on that the Paradox team does. Still, I remain dubious that this was the best solution to the problem. Certainly, going by what I understood of the code, it wouldn't seem to be. I accept that I may be wrong on this, based on things I can't possibly know.
Okay, yeah, I thought you might, but wasn't sure. So I thought I'd take a stab at clarifying. :) But yeah I agree, that I also personally haven't seen any problem with the code in what I can access of it.
 
It certainly came off as dickish. It is reductionist. If the issue is sending off concubines and consorts then it only had to do a check it already did for lover issues - is this person attracted to this sex? If not, turn it down. You can even add a further, sloppy, restrictive check of A) am I openly a sodomite? or B) is same sex relations accepted in my religion?

And capitalism is full of nasty features - but that includes making that 5% happy if it's something nice and cheap like adding 3 checks in. It also means that they will be responsive to people being upset because those are potentially lost sales on future expansions and lost sales on referrals with a PR scandal - and the PR costs are much higher than that of adding in a 3 point check.

Of course, the real issue is that the number of potential customers that either explicitly want this or care enough that they want LGBTQIA people to have access to it solidly outnumbers the ptoential customers that would want it gone. Decent people potential sales > Bigot potential sales. Moreover, those bigots also highly correlate with the people who are never satisfied and aren't going to be happy regardless of what is done. Companies want the decent majority's business unless they're going for a niche market - which they would only do if they had some serious competition and no one else has games comparable to Paradox.



Your problem is that you are not dealing with people simply wanting a new feature - they're upset because a feature that already exists was taken away. My impression of what you said previously was that you believed it to be to bug issues based on complete supposition, not that you knew that was the actual issue. If it were, which modders do not believe, you are putting the priority based upon the time it takes to deal with the bug reports that seem to be autogenerated - which is people that the company has to pay to do the job of going through them. It is a man hours issue. However, the proper solution was not to hardcode heterosexism into the game, but rather to fix the bug reporter so that it doesn't falsely report bugs where they don't actually exist. Moreover, because it was something that was there, that the community put in free man hours to make available, and you took it away - it has become a PR issue. That might change the priorities because PR issues usually appear far ahead of modding requests.
It came off, but wasn't meant to be. I bear no ill will, I am just trying to explain it in what IS absolutely reductionist terms, which is how these corporations think. They look at the bottom line.
 
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Firstly I would like to note that even if the conclusion was not what I was hoping for, I do still appreciate developer feedback. So thank you for that @blackninja9939. Even a disappointing message is better than nothing.

The frustration with the new gender-check to concubinage stems largely from what it implies about developer priorities. If there was serious discussion within the team about the changes necessary for same-sex marriages, then there is a good chance that the developer adding that check as well as the reviewers of the change should have understood this to be a regression. That this slips through without remark or documentation implies that the issue simply isn't on their minds.

Being a software developer myself, I do understand that implementing all of the features requested in the OP may have implementation hurdles that are not obvious from the outside. While I did demonstrate earlier in the thread that a good portion of the requested functionality seems to already be handled tolerably by the game engine, I do understand the reluctance to give full access to that functionality if there remain issues in some outstanding areas.

That said, my own experiments with in-memory modification and the modding community's success with same-sex concubines implies that some subset of these features are being gated unnecessarily.

To confirm that, I suppose my next step would be to start reverse engineering the game engine to see what small changes might be reasonable to make. I was hoping I could avoid that step, as the process is quite onerous and error prone, but I do have the technical background to attempt it. I'm not particularly eager to maintain a binary patch or code injection system for this game, but it's possible that it could be done. I will see what I can do, but I would ask that people not expect anything from me in the short-term.
 
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If the intent is to put it off rather than issuing a hotfix, I would strongly suggest doing so with more story events involving concubines and consorts - make them much more intimate. I'm not devastated that they're gone since there isn't much concubines and consorts do other than provide babies which same sex ones cannot do - though it might work if we could have trans characters introduced in with the return (and the stress system could do wonders for raising awareness of the stress of being closeted for characters who haven't come out into the open) who can reproduce with cis counterparts of the same gender.
I feel like this is on the modders (to make them interesting). In my mod, I made same-sex concubines give piety per month (since they were considered holy). This is the trade-off for them not being able to produce kids.

Like, we're not asking for same-sex marriage or concubines to be included in the base game, though that would be nice. I feel like it'd be enough for Paradox to allow it to be moddable, and leave it for the modders to make it worthwhile.
 
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Hey, maybe you guys can prioritize this for a release in Pride Month? I know scopes are made sometimes months in advance but perhaps August is doable? (Though think pride is earlier elsewhere) I, personally, think base game would actually make the most sense because if I can make an ahistorical incestuous cannibalistic murder cult, why not allow same sex marriage? Can even make it a rule like matrilineal marriages. Perhaps putting this forward as a modding tool request, instead of a full fledged feature request put it further down on the list of priorities than it should be. (I know at my own job bugs, tasks, etc... is a list a mile long and no release is long enough so we have to prioritise)

I know that's a bit unreasonable, given my own experience in the industry, but maybe Paradox can do that, eh? They did improve representation a lot.

Also, unfortunately blackninja 9939 isn't the person calling the shots so while they're explaining what some of the reasoning may or may not be, it's not their fault.
 
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The frustration with the new gender-check to concubinage stems largely from what it implies about developer priorities. If there was serious discussion within the team about the changes necessary for same-sex marriages, then there is a good chance that the developer adding that check as well as the reviewers of the change should have understood this to be a regression. That this slips through without remark or documentation implies that the issue simply isn't on their minds.

This is exactly what I thought. This has been handled terribly. They've got to know what the reaction would be to shadow-banning the only "at least" in this whole situation, or else it hasn't really crossed their minds at all.

Also, unfortunately blackninja 9939 isn't the person calling the shots so while they're explaining what some of the reasoning may or may not be, it's not their fault.

I know; I wish they'd send whoever's fault it is instead.
 
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