Lurker > KanzarisKelshen

Honestly I felt that match was a long time coming

I'm just glad this time no one tried to argue the fact Dresden's stamina is dogshit

I couldn't find book quotes last time because I didn't have Peace Talks on my computer, but it was infurating that people disregarded him tapping out as a thing

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4-0. I count me, Drak, Shonen and HB for Cloud, no votes for Harry.

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NFUN posted...

cloud was nominated as the "most recognizable" relevant video game character. this is not Advent Children Cloud

Nonsense. It's still the same character. Arbitrary variance in when a character is represented is asinine. Next you'll say we have to abide by what super deformed graphics show. This isn't a case like say, Luke's where using EU material makes no sense because it's no longer canonical. AC is explicitly part of the canon of FF7, and it's Cloud at his strongest. The argument used with the Doomslayer that it's material released since he was nominated doesn't apply either, the movie's been out for ages.

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Drakeryn posted...

Will wait for more arguments. Cloud destroys books 1-3 Dresden, which is as far as I got in the series, but I think Dresden powers up significantly later?

He does power up significantly. Here's an excerpt showing his current power level (it's the first bit, not the second):

On an ordinary night, the gale that my spell conjured would have been able to toss furniture around a room.

Tonight, I could have tossed furniture trucks.

Why am I pointing this out? Because the above quote comes from the latest book, while Harry is in very special circumstances. Like, this level of special:

Suddenly I was aware of the creatures of Winter beneath my command, racing to join us. The temperature around us abruptly plummeted. White winter frost began to crackle across the face of the Bean, and Mab shuddered and arched her back, her eyes closing, as the breath of Winter itself gathered around us. White mist began to thicken the grey haze of the city. The air suddenly became close, intimate, as the cloud of cold vapor enveloped the cohort.

The faemetal weapons of the Sidhe began to creak and moan as deathly frost formed upon them.

And I realized that I could suddenly see no farther than maybe fifteen feet, tops.

We wont be able to see them coming, I said in a low voice.

Irrelevant, Mab replied.

In the shadows of the Bean behind us gathered the malks and Black Dogs, the rake and the ogre, the gnomes and double dozens of the viciously mischievous Little Folk of Winter.

Before us, the Sidhe abruptly began to chant and sing, gesturing with their hands as they did. Flickers of light glittered over the cohort in a dome. Shapes and sigils, runes and formulae, crackled briefly in the air, as two hundred sorcerers gathered their power from the hyperenergetic air.

What the hell? I held up my staff, opening the channels to the energy storage structures inside, and drew that energy down into it. The task normally took an hour of intense concentration and exhausting effort, when I had to provide the energy for the staff myself. With the air gone mad with power, the staff charged in seconds, which should not have been possible, not without the excess energy overflowing into waste heat and burning the thing to a crisp.

Instead, it simply let out a low hum, the runes carved into glowing green-gold, and the faint, excellent scent of scorched wood edged the night.

But the problem is his stamina still sucks. When that juice runs out and he's left with just his own charge, he manages to cast exactly three spells -- across an entire pitched large scale battle, no less. One's an explicitly economical invisibility spell, one's a shield, and one's a ritual binding. Earlier, when he's running on a lesser magical charge in the air, he still gets winded after a few spells in quick succession, too. The point being, we know around how hard he can hit, and we know how often he can do so, and the answer is 'not very'. It's a bad matchup vs someone who doesn't quit, is very resilient, and very much stronger to boot.

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ZeeksFire posted...

Using blatant invincibility versus any other of the hundreds of other tools that cloud has, was the point i was making. I mean, you have his bike, various materia (including comparing summons how they work in the remake vs normal (I AM NOT COUNTING KOTR as a valid choice)). Also looking at the remake, cloud is vastly more on the ground, he is not an aerial fighter, barring some of his limits... although it does give a vastly more impressive view of his swordplay in there.

(We had that complaint on maxwell in the discussion topic just a bit ago, and I don't think cloud would be the person to lean on starting with invincibility (that's a player designation), he'd go in with the sword.)

The remake is irrelevant. Advent Children is, at the moment, Cloud at his peak of power. Why would you use something that doesn't showcase him at his strongest?

And sure, let's talk all his other tools then -- Cloud has Haste, which lets him go at double speed. He has Shell, which halves the damage he takes, and Dragon Force, which doubles his magic defense (these stack with each other). So he 's taking a quarter of the damage from anything that hits him. He has Bad Breath, which inflicts, among other things, blindness, silence, mini and frog at once, making fighting impossible. He has Magic Hammer, which drains MP -- refer to the whole 'Harry's casting stamina fucking blows' bit here in case you're wondering why this matters. And he is, of course, a massive force in a melee. Refer to the whole 'cuts his way through skyscrapers' bit up above. He has all the tools to counter Harry and I don't even think he needs them in the first place considering none of Harry's attacks are at all close to the level of things he's survived unscathed. I don't really see how he loses it, he's just on a different tier of power compared to his opponent.

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ZeeksFire posted...

Did i ever say materia are noncanon? Don't be a jerk on putting words in my mouth.

It was implied by 'shield is a very scrub argument'. Do you expect him to not use his tools? If not, why would it be a scrub argument to deploy a defense that makes him mostly invulnerable so he can close into his most comfortably striking range?

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oh yeah, and because it's relevant here

https://youtu.be/pyP18j7y1FA?t=481

Cloud literally facetanks a megaflare

Harry's Forzare is a lot of things, but it's not megaflare strong

Like how exactly is he gonna put Cloud down? Especially when you remember Cloud has curing materia at his disposal too. And you can't even argue 'noooo materia are noncanon', he equips them in multiple places in the franchise.

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My dude, have you seen Cloud fight? He's not going to be bothered by ice of all things. Dude spends his time airborne.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0KA53cKNnI

Maybe a look at his fighting style is in order here. Look at this and tell me 'oh no slippery ice' matters at all to him. This also showcases just how little I think a Soulgaze matters here. There's no more nightmarish scenario for Cloud than 'holy SHIT, Sephiroth is back and toying with me' and he still pulls through. His mental isn't that fragile after he's done overcoming his traumas in the Lifestream.

And yes, Forzare could pierce Shield, but that still leaves Harry with only a singular option and nothing else, and he doesn't have time to switch around. Cloud's super fast and Harry traditionally has a terrible time with fast enemies, who are themselves way slower than Cloud.

EDIT: I think this bears repetition BTW, because while I find the idea of 'a soulgaze happens mid-combat' asinine, I want to really debunk this idea. Cloud falls into the heart of the planet, gets in direct contact with an overload of souls, faces his own traumas and failings, aka the things that hurt him most, and comes out of the experience better off and a more complete person. I don't think soulgazing Dresden is going to do anything to him. This is an actual fight, and one Dresden is woefully underequipped to handle. His wheelhouse is big slow enemies, not someone who moves faster than he can react to.

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Cloud.

Harry runs out of spellcasts after a couple spells. For anyone doubting, reference the latest book where he spellslings willy nilly but it's explicitly listed as a temporary powerup and once it runs out he has like, two spells' worth of juice. Cloud has a short lasting Shield spell that makes him completely invulnerable to damage. The way this fight plays out is Cloud casts that, rushes in while Dresden can't hurt him at all, gets into melee range, and savagely butchers him because there's absolutely nothing he can do against a swordsman that slices apart whole buildings and kills skyscraper sized foes.

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NFUN posted...

nanomachines still have nothing to do with electricity

Also this is wrong, Armstrong's nanos do. He explicitly drains electricity from nearby electrical things to power them. That's like, a cutscene in MGR that plays twice, even.

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Armstrong brute forces through Maxwell. He's not going to have time to do the fancy shit.

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Ah yes, buildings

that thing the Doomslayer smashes through

oh wait no, he smashes through space stations instead, while being shot from a cannon

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Several tons of rock isn't going to stop the Doomslayer. Try maybe three or four orders of magnitude higher. The dude is so resilient to blunt force impacts all it's likely to do is piss him off, and his weaponry can cut him a way out. Jack has to do some major sacrificial plays to win, and I don't think he will.

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Pokalicious posted...

Holy shit

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NFUN posted...

did you know cameras don't work if they are broken? like, i'm not particularly versed in regards to Jack's powers, but there are many solutions to counter the cameras regardless of how powerful vega is, and they're not particularly complex. vega can deal with the city's technology, jack deals with the actual fucking city

Did you know Jack doesn't know what VEGA can do? It doesn't matter if he has ways to counter if he doesn't know he has to do so. This is what we in the business call 'failing Occam's Razor' -- VEGA is just doing its default thing here, while Jack has to deviate from a default (which would be scanning and trying to make a play against the Slayer, without knowing he himself is being spied on) to counter. One of these is less probable than the other. Fundamentally, this is why I think the Slayer wins. Jack can defeat him, but the path to victory (collapsing the city on his head) is pretty antithetical to what he does. It's a poor king that burns his city to the ground to defeat his enemies, indeed.

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It's Jack. It's Jack's city by virtue of him being in it. I have to imagine he has a way to trivially negate this (additionally, he'd know where Doomguy is far more intuitively and would absolutely be able to set the terms of the fight as soon as he entered the city)

Such as? Because Jack scales in power based on the city he's in. VEGA is always VEGA, an AI that is effectively a god of technology. It's kind of like what'd happen if Jack and the Slayer met face to face, but writ techy: conceptual advantages vs sheer brute force, except arguably even more lopsided in VEGA's favor than it is for the Slayer because the lore is so comically strong for him. Using just Doom 2016 lore, VEGA runs Mars in every single way possible, with no oversight nor control save his own directives. His processing power is so massive, his core runs hotter than the sun and studying his functionality is a field unto itself. And if we consider Doom Eternal, well, he created the interdimensional species that set all of the events of the Doom series into motion by empowering Hell in the first place, as their actual, literal god.

I would legitimately consider VEGA more powerful than the Slayer in their respective arenas, and I'm as big a fanboy of the Slayer as they come. Jack has no chance whatsoever in neutral conditions against him.

EDIT: And to be clear, yes, Jack can strike from underground still and get an ambush. The problem is this voids the one way he has to win vs the Slayer, which is basically caving the whole city in on his head. In a head to head match he gets ripped and torn apart.

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NFUN posted...

this is, in fact, mid

Would Doomslayer survive a pretty thorough sneak attack? He's be able to destroy the city with ease if he realized he needed to, but he needs to figure that out first

I can't imagine the sneak attack is gonna be an issue. If we assume this is neutral-ish terrain, then there's a city and it has cameras. VEGA is with him and there's no chance modern day tech even takes him a picosecond to crack. He should be able to get visuals on Jack and track him pretty closely, and then pick the engagement.

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Shouldn't this be medium tier

Coulda sworn the Slayer was in mid, not high, and it was a whole thing in his last match

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Shonen_Bat posted...

Doesn't the mind trick only work on weak-willed people? Aang might have been naive enough to fall for it at the start of the series but the Aang who outwilled Ozai isn't losing to a mind trick.

Pretty heavily leaning Aang right now, he has a lot more ways to control the battle with his bending and he can redirect Luke's best ranged option (force lightning)

I wasn't talking about literal mindtricks. I was talking about how Luke pulls off a massive, battlefield-spanning illusion in TLJ, which fools even other jedi. Basically I don't think Aang can win if he doesn't even realize the sort of enemy he's fighting and what he's actually doing.

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Luke mindfucks Aang with mindtricks and demolishes him. If we're counting movie Luke, his peak of power is in The Last Jedi and that Luke is clearly miles ahead of Aang and a much wilier bastard than him. No chance.

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Pirateking2000 posted...

Yeah I think the main thing with Giorno is that unless you just obliterate him he can definitely bullshit something with his weird ass stand. He's had his neck chomped and was riddled with holes yet still managed to heal himself and come up with something. I guess it depends just how much Terrarian gets to have and how much they can take if Giorno somehow manages to get close somehow and MUDA them

If you assume standard equipment for the Player I would give them a full set of endgame armor, wings, the fully upgraded PDA, a variety of endgame weapons for their weapon type of choice, the UFO or Cute Fishron, a ton of the normal construction materials and tools, a Clentaminator, and maybe a few heart lanterns. This seems fair to me since it's shit you're always gonna carry with you in any sort of reasonable Terraria playthrough, as arena construction is a very real thing in that game. It's why I don't feel Giorno has a chance, Terraria players have to prep like crazy to beat fights and that means being ready to invent nonsensical solutions at the drop of a hat.

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The Player

Giorno has no way of countering the Vortex Beater from an invisible Player, or the Last Prism from a million fuckin miles away if you like magic. I haven't checked the 1.4 update but I bet there's some other bullshit that's extra stupid in there too. If this wasn't enough, the Player has very similar abilities to bullshit solutions at a rapid pace to Giorno, just using construction materials instead of animals. I don't really want to post the arguments I concocted back when I was playing Mercs 4 just in case I had to buy the Player and argue how stupid his material construction was to a cheap win, but assume it starts with 'effectively lightspeed movement via intentionally preserved and canonized glitches + turning the terrain into stone that bleeds lava' and it goes up from there.

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also yeah, Alan Wake is like, 80% Twin Peaks, 100% Stephen King, and 20% Max Payne DNA and it's fuckin good that it is. Such a cool setup.

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super minor spoiler that you need to know about: do NOT, under any circumstance, skip the end of episode 4 music. It's the most important one in the game!

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Bigby

sold on the 'go to the bar, ff' interpretation

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Finished playing this game a lil while back. it is, in a word, lit. It's got Walking Simulator-levels of background lore content, like any Remedy game, but paired with a Twin Peaks-esque narrative, it's so good. And the music, man...absolutely on point as well.

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I'm of the opinion all these Death characters are kinda lame, chuck the Host as a late entry into this bracket to remove them and quietly bow out tbqqqqh

but I'm not gonna antivote cuz my apathy for this match is tremendous. Total waste of Yujiro's talents if he loses here since he's an interesting fighter, tho

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ninkendo posted...

Lubu and Tina Armstrong double pack

I would absolutely lose my shit if Lu Bu made it in

can you imagine how cancerous his normals would be lmao

Disjointed sword normals? Fuck that, we got spear normals now son

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And ninja gaiden music is HOTTTTTT

can't say this and not post a classic bop, so lemme fill right in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giu-NkRqRZw

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Tentative Star vote. If she can scry and prep for a fight, I feel she might have a decent shot at the boss. My take is that the Boss wins if she gets the Dubstep Gun or TK holds off, but loses in a straight up fight because Star is better overall. Would be open to being swayed by counterarguments though.

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How well does Star deal with telekinesis into being shot to death? Easy strat for the boss to open with and very deadly.

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ZeeksFire posted...

I'd say the problem is can Sam find out this is yet another monster before engaging. If sam can do successful reconnisance and then disengage to get weapons that can deal with the beast, Sam wins.

What weapons? Do you think there's a nuclear plant he can cause a meltdown of? That's the kinda thing he'll need to take the Beast down. He's not vulnerable to conventional weapons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Etw_BwRoY

This doesn't kill him. You tell me what kind of weapon Sam can find that will do more than this.

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The Beast

Sam can't hurt him. Dude tanks being Shaolin Palmed, which is pretty much comparable to getting hit by a building sized wrecking ball.

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redrocket posted...

Also, on the subject of Rand, apparently Balefire is too OP to allow him to have it, even though its a signature ability of his. But Gambit gets his one time super powerup because why not.

Balefire doesn't make senes because peak Rand doesn't use it. He uses everything else in his arsenal instead, and it relies on a powerup anyway.

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Cloud has an invulnerability spell and petrification, just to name two options. There's no reason he loses this unless he fucks up.

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Pirateking2000 posted...

What does New Sun Gambit do?

Also if something like this or MPFC happens again whenever someone feels like running it just some suggestions

-Entries should be allowed all their stuff as intended or specific versions / nerfs decided prior. There were way too many flimsy things from match to match with characters not being allowed stuff on the spot or scenarios like Neo where he was suddenly not allowed his super powers since he was outside the matrix when he was likely nominated with them in mind.
-Not taking long between nomination and the tournament. Earlier is better as people's interests
-If different brackets are kept could have em run simultaneously not sure though.
-Information for the entries attached in their matches.
-I can personally take or leave the whole large neutral ground scene where they have to hunt each other. I can see how such a factor can play in a fight

This is how I ran MPFC last time, and while it was a clusterfuck, it was a clusterfuck for reasons unrelated to the infrastructure of the contest, yeah.

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Gambit

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Feel like Gambit wins probably

Bugs is good, but full power gambit is prolly better

(still is a dumb finals tho)

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Dresden is a fraud but not enough of a fraud to lose to Megumin. He can take an Extreme Consequence if it comes down to it.

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fun fact about null phys btw

it's specifically vs melee attacks only, because P5 has Gun type once again

Which means you can just, y'know, bring a McGunner with a submachinegun and ventilate him that way in low tier unless he has a persona that is immune to Gun (of which there's like, exactly one that has natural gun immunity + phys immunity). Even more compelling arguments to believe he could have it without issues, since it distinguishes damage types

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X_Dante_X posted...

i do agree that null phys should be allowed back. I could see banning custom options that provide it in low tier potentially though (assuming tiers are still a thing in future mercs), since i kinda hate the thought that buying him down allows literal insta wins against some comps early game when people don't have lowbies with other options beyond melee. This is only a fear super early game though i would think

I would accept this (with the caveat that it should auto-replace with Resist Phys if so as a courtesy to the player), just as much as I could see 'release Joker later when it's assumed you can bring SOMEONE to fight him'

Then again I also think a joker with good customizations is a 5/week so it's like, would this truly be more broken than letting sora wild out in low without ability-smashing him

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Joker.

So basically, you have Yu Narukami at baseline, plus gun respect, plus stealth capabilities, plus psychic attacks, plus better cutscene feats, and the only downside is less plot hype for Satanael than Izanagi no Okami, which doesn't matter because voters do not respect that Izanagi no Okami is a massive powerup. All of this makes Joker pretty attractive as a baseline. As a bonus, he has a better base build skeleton to work with if you assume he can riff on Yu's abilities from M4, vs the crap Samus got across her multiple iterations. In general, I'm inclined to think that Joker's better, particularly if he's allowed to use any of the, y'know, actually good passives and abilities instead of being hamstrung because 'oh no immunity to phys, how will we ever counter this, god forbid mages matter'.

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Darth Bane

Lightsaber + force choke vs not-capable-of-resisting. Easy life.

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Gambit for now, though I'm open to being convinced otherwise. Can we get a couple video showings of BH's best feats in here?

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Which makes sense, because Doom + TES + Fallout + etc. etc. etc. probably IS worth more than SW, and that's not even counting everything else Zenimax owns.

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HE-MAN, MASTER OF MID-TIER

(caps)

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Not really feeling Magnus here but not voting yet. A Celestial is merely a middle tier reality warper. Beating the catholic god would require something more on the level of standing toe to toe with Eternity or a similar entity. Has he ever done it?

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KamikazePotato posted...

I hated 13's battle system, and it didn't get much better after it supposedly opened up 30 hours into the game. I don't think I'm the minority in that opinion either.

seconded

kuso game

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Bugs definitely has consistent attributes

For example, he tends to be massively chill unless you piss him off -- the whole 'of course you realize, this means war!' bit and all. He also tends to prefer ironic punishments instead of just doing what's efficient. He's a huge troll. Etcetera etcetera.

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KamikazePotato posted...

The technology in FF8 always felt like a big deal that informed the world, probably more than any other Final Fantasy game game. You've got going to space, lots of big mechs, a ridiculously-advanced futuristic city, other modern-level sprawling cities, everything about Balamb Garden, ect. It wasn't super important to the plot most of the time but it shaped the atmosphere.

This. I've argued for a long time FF8 has one of the two most distinct FF worlds for this reason. There's very, very few games out there that have that very specific mix of ultra high technology and pastoral environments. Other than CrossCode, I can't think of many. A lot of your missions are deeply steeped in problems and circumstances of the modern day -- a multi-train hijacking, disabling a communications tower, a political assassination with a sniper rifle, the trip to the moon, stopping a nuclear missile launch... it's not a theme of the work but it does affect how the work unfolds for sure.

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