20th Anniversary Celebration: Wrath of the Lich King Memories Edition

Wyrmrest Accord
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This is a weekly series! Here are the threads so far…

:point_up: Keep sharing! A new expansion thread will drop each week.

Wrath of the Lich King Memories

Alrighty, oldies. We’re still up. The youngins will be joining us in a few expansions but for now, let’s wave our canes and talk about late 2008… it’s Lich King time.

Incoming Memories…

Many consider WotLK the pinnacle of WoW expansions and look back at it with unfiltered nostalgia. Does it still live up to that hype?

What were the most innocently n00bish things you did as a baby WoW player? (C’mon, we were still doing dumb things in Wrath.)

What do you consider to be your greatest Wrath achievement?

The Wrath pre-launch event recreated Vanilla’s Blood Plague but the devs meant for it to happen this time. Got any OOC or IC stories to share about the plague?

The Argent Tournament patch was the first of its kind. What did you love? What did you hate? Would you like to see a patch like this again?

For better or worse, global Looking for Dungeon (queueing with off-server players) was introduced this expansion. How did it change gameplay for you?

What would Today You say to Wrath You?

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Not especially. We miss the atmosphere, the vibe. Going through Wrath content in 2024 reveals a lot of the problems with this era of WarCraft lore - specifically the expectation that if you give a damn about the lore, you’re reading supplementary material. The War on Magic just literally comes out of nowhere, and Northrend really showcases the problems with the vast vistas that defined the pre-Cataclysm design philosophy of WoW. By that I mean it’s vast and a hell of a lot of time is spent going from Point A to Point B and back again. Pre-flying can make this a major chore.

The expansion literally has a “Beach Episode” (ie The Argent Tournament) content patch just to pad things out. Why the absolute hell would the Crusade bother with a Tournament to decide who gets to go to Icecrown and then hold it in Icecrown? Why would the Alliance and Horde leadership both attend? Arthas missed a trick by not just obliterating everybody there and then.

Survival Spec’s last hurrah. Wistful sigh
Desperately trying to make Dual Wielding Melee Survival a thing, since it felt more “Elfish”.

My Silver Covenant Hippogryph and Sunreaver Dragonhawk remain prized and common mounts I use to this day.

I missed the pre-launch event after my spectacular flame out with Impossibilium at the end of Burning Crusade and my father’s non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis.

Kinda covered this above, but really…it was fun. Just poorly placed (This should have been held in like the Grizzly Hills or somewhere further away from literal Icecrown). Jousting was never that intuitive, especially not the one daily that saw us having to use it against Scourge.

Important distinction - Global LFD happened in Wrath. Prior to this, LFD in TBC was Server exclusive. As for it, the game changer for me was I no longer had to wait until my days off to do dungeons because Thorium Brotherhood was already declining by that point and Scarlet Crusade wasn’t much better. It was during this era that I abandoned my Holy Paladin entirely (I can even tell you exactly where he made it to. Zul’Drak. Level 74. Left him at the main Argent base in that zone and never logged into him again) and made Starstalker my main.

Things are hard right now in a lot of ways, but the best is literally right around the corner.

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Many consider WotLK the pinnacle of WoW expansions and look back at it with unfiltered nostalgia. Does it still live up to that hype?

I remember thinking at the time that it was a pinnacle of WoW storytelling for that time. That said, Vanndrel already outlined above how it still had a lot of shortcomings compared to how WoW does its IG story today. I’d argue that a different expansion was the turning point for good in-game storytelling but we have to wait a few more weeks for that one…

What were the most innocently n00bish things you did as a baby WoW player? (C’mon, we were still doing dumb things in Wrath.)

I leaned more fully into Holy paladin and got really, really into downranking spells for min-maxing. I’m not even sure if it was a good idea. This is genuinely when I felt “heal bot” was a real spec because my FoLs and HLs were going off like crazy. I didn’t Hpal at this point because I liked it, I just felt sunk cost fallacy because I didn’t want to level again and she (at the time) was my main RP character.

What do you consider to be your greatest Wrath achievement?

I also got the Silver Covenant Hippogryph and I was stoked to have a hippogryph flying mount that wasn’t the Teldrassil taxi. I used it ICly as both a land and ground mount for some time and still have it in my mount favorites to this day.

The Wrath pre-launch event recreated Vanilla’s Blood Plague but the devs meant for it to happen this time. Got any OOC or IC stories to share about the plague?

I’ve told this story on these forums before, but my old server got really into the Plague as a roleplay concept. We set up ad hoc shelters and places for afflicted players to be cleansed. As the Plague grew more and more resistant to cleansing (and also starting spreading to the cleansers), it wasn’t too long after that these shelters became ghost towns. We were effectively social distancing without being told.

On the last morning on the Plague, I spread and gathered up dozens of zombified Ironforge guards and NPCs with the goal of training them into the AH/bank area. Though SW had an AH since 1.9, IF was still a place people hung out out of habit. Sadly for me, midway between the Mystic Ward and Commons, the event ended and it stopped spreading. It took me a moment to realize this and by then, the guard spawns outnumbered us (because we could no longer zombify them) and eventually my horde dwindled to nothing.

And thus ended prematurely what I at the time hoped would have been my greatest WoW prank. Sadness.

The Argent Tournament patch was the first of its kind. What did you love? What did you hate? Would you like to see a patch like this again?

The Lore and logistical ramifications of the Argent Tournament are hilarious, but as far as a daily zone, it was a lot of fun. It generated a lot of RP and is still used as faire or tourney grounds to this day. My server hosted its own tournaments there for a few years, long before the MG iteration. I’d be game for another tournament grounds with more canonical sense to the plot — maybe somewhere less freezing, too.

For better or worse, global Looking for Dungeon (queueing with off-server players) was introduced this expansion. How did it change gameplay for you?

I was overseas for the semester right before this change then returned when players had already adjusted to the shift. It was almost a Twilight Zone experience for me with how quickly we queued, pulled EVERYTHING with NO crowd control while guildies vibed in Ventrilo/Mumble, and the pugs would leave without a word. It felt so much more coldly transactional and dungeons became more of a means-to-an-end than a memorable experience. The weirdest thing was, I had all those conflicted thoughts whirling in my head while everyone else had already adjusted to it and was having a good time… I felt like I’d walked into a parallel WoW dimension and no one noticed but me. I eventually got used to it, but that initial uncanny feeling was a core WoW memory for me.

(Also, updated the OP with clarification: local LFD was available in BC but the cross-server version as we have today rolled out during Wrath. Thanks, Vanndrel.)

What would Today You say to Wrath You?

The two college friends you went to Wrath launch to pick up your last physical copy of the game? They’ll still be your buds in 2024 playing a wonderful game called Helldivers 2. Oh, and both of them will have kids before you. For one of them, that’s not surprising… for the other, holy crap they matured a lot. Good for them.

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Honestly I have a lot more nostalgia for the first two entries than WotLK. Wrath was great, don’t get me wrong, but some of the close friends I started playing with had stopped by Wrath so it was a lonelier time for me. I think Wrath was also when MG and WrA opened so it was an odd time of jumping between new servers for me.

Mechanically I think it was a good time though. The vanilla era RP elements were still pretty healthy, leveling was still a grand journey, and everyone was still sort of noobish enough that the extreme divide between normies and sweaties hadn’t emerged yet. Hard modes existed for some of the raids but overall a lot of the content felt very accessible, and even as a pretty non-hardcore person I did some raids in this era without ever being made to feel bad about myself while doing it.

It isn’t much of an achievement but the first thing which came to mind was building my own motorcycle. It was a complicated recipe! I had to grind a lot of mechagnomes or something!

Mostly I remember spreading the blight through the barrens and being delighted to discover that zombies could talk cross-faction, because there were a lot of horde zombies around.

It gets a lot of grief for being thematically silly but I’m sort of nostalgic for it. I did a lot of those dailies and the festive fair music always brings me back to that era.

I did a ridiculous amount of heroic tanking in WotLK, mostly after LFD was introduced. You had those rep tabards, you had easy queues as prot… so, the first change for me was getting addicted to running heroics a lot. I was still sort of addicted to it through Cata, and it wasn’t until MoP made heroics mostly pointless that I stopped doing LFD so much.

But in retrospect all those dungeons didn’t win me any pals (even if someone liked my tanking I don’t think the tech allowed you to easily friend/communicate with people x-server until later). So it was basically a big asocial waste of time, compared to the vanilla wailing caverns crawls which could earn you pals for life, or at least a couple dudes who’d ask you to tank random stuff for them.

Anyway, I think server communities were still mostly healthy in WotLK, since you had big community-building features like Wintergrasp where you’d see the same names over and over. It was just the beginning of something bad that got worse once CRZ/sharding were added.

stop buying race/faction changes. I think those were introduced in wotlk and I remember being like 6 different races on one character for some reason

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I think so! It was very cool to have two starting zones that were vastly different from one another!! It was fun asking guildies which zone they were going to start in and everyone having different plans! Exploring was very cool! The isolation of Sholazar Basin and the trek up Storm Peaks was a mood!!

I think that was when people started to really get deep into lore theory and it was very cool finding these grand Titan ruins but know so very little about them.

I was perpetually broke and I think I was still using basic flying because I couldn’t afford epic flying.

I just remember how insanely fun it was to spread chaos around Orgrimmar. I wasn’t on an RP server so RP, just a buncha idiot zombies infecting NPCs and spreading the plague far and wide.

I wasn’t the biggest fan, I’m not a hater but it just seemed silly to me to go from raiding an ancient Titan facility and fighting an Old God to a Ye Olde Timey Ren Faire.

This was about the time I quit WoW though, raiding non-stop from TBC to Wrath really burned me out for good. I didn’t come back to WoW until late Cata to check it out and again later shortly after the release of Mists.

I had a pretty solid guild back then and I don’t have any memories using LFG tbh. I was probably running most stuff with guild mates.

Quit your raiding guild and move to WRA.

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Many consider WotLK the pinnacle of WoW expansions and look back at it with unfiltered nostalgia. Does it still live up to that hype?

It was probably peak RP time for me, so I’m nostalgic for that. The expansion was pretty good, but going back to those zones reveals a lot of issues in 20/20 hindsight and so much of the storytelling didn’t really make sense in retrospect, but I think most of us were having too much fun to care. It was also the time I developed Zalinara’s backstory (thanks, Ancient Nerubian Puzzle Box!) and started transitioning to her as my RP main.

OTOH, that was also the time we started to see the smaller RP servers decline as people moved to WrA (still fairly new back then) and MG. By the end of LK my server (Shadow Council) was noticeably smaller than it had been.

What were the most innocently n00bish things you did as a baby WoW player? (C’mon, we were still doing dumb things in Wrath.)

What do you consider to be your greatest Wrath achievement?

My RP guild finally managing to down Arthas in ICC. It took us to the very end of the expansion, but we finally did it.

The Wrath pre-launch event recreated Vanilla’s Blood Plague but the devs meant for it to happen this time. Got any OOC or IC stories to share about the plague?

I remember it as absolute chaotic fun. I don’t think we did much RP off of it but it was a hoot. I was amused by the people who complained it was “God-moddy” since it interfered with their RP.

The Argent Tournament patch was the first of its kind. What did you love? What did you hate? Would you like to see a patch like this again?

WoW doesn’t make a lot of sense at the best of times, but I remember the general reaction to the tournament being “WTF?” But the dailies were fun and the rewards were decent, so most people just kind of shrugged and rolled with it.

For better or worse, global Looking for Dungeon (queueing with off-server players) was introduced this expansion. How did it change gameplay for you?

Not much, honestly. I had a good guild and large friend group so I was mostly running dungeons with friends.

What would Today You say to Wrath You?

Seriously consider moving to WrA or MG instead of watching your server slowly die.

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Enjoy it, but also know better times are coming.

Edit: well I screwed that quote stuff up, right and proper.

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Still my favorite expansion.

Naively wanted to make everyone happy.

First WrA 10-man Lich King kill.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Loved all the mini game quests. They’ve carried those forward pretty well I think.

I liked being able to queue up pretty quick. It’s pretty much one of the best QoL improvements they’ve ever brought.

All bleeding stops eventually and this too shall pass.

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Oh, I really should jump in about this point:

Incoming Memories…

Many consider WotLK the pinnacle of WoW expansions and look back at it with unfiltered nostalgia. Does it still live up to that hype?

I think so - perhaps it’s rose-colored glasses, but in a lot of ways Wrath is the pinnacle of the kind of storytelling possible in an MMO. Three major subplots, a really good villain plan - a really good Villain! - one of the best dungeons ever (even if we never get to see them any more - Halls of Reflection was absolutely a HUGE departure, and absolutely fantastic) - a hero class with its own subplot and just some of the best zones to this day - not everything hit, but almost everything did. Even the game changes were net-positive here.

What were the most innocently n00bish things you did as a baby WoW player? (C’mon, we were still doing dumb things in Wrath.)

… I can’t remember. Probably falling off of things; so many RP snafus. :slight_smile:

What do you consider to be your greatest Wrath achievement?

That’s easy. This is the xpac where i found what is now the Vanguard. I’ve been with the guild for sixteen years now, and wouldn’t trade it. It was also the first xpac where I did everything but raiding - which I wish I’d done, but didn’t start until much later.

The Wrath pre-launch event recreated Vanilla’s Blood Plague but the devs meant for it to happen this time. Got any OOC or IC stories to share about the plague?

To this day, I remember this launch event - I remember the Blood Plague, too, but I truly do remember this as the best of the best launch events. You felt the stakes as Stormwind filled up with corpses, and it was a lot of fun to run around as a ghoul and explode on people, too. It made you want to go kick in Arthas’s teeth.

The Argent Tournament patch was the first of its kind. What did you love? What did you hate? Would you like to see a patch like this again?

I loved the tournament itself - but I never really enjoyed grinding; the Tournament was a great touch of flavor (and its peripheral quests were great) - and it also introduced some catchup mechanics for non-raiders that persist until this day.

For me? A mixed bag - loved the aesthetic, wasn’t a big fan of the grindy nature of it - and to this day I still don’t have all the mounts I want/stuff I want from the tourney, simply because of how long that grind really is.

For better or worse, global Looking for Dungeon (queueing with off-server players) was introduced this expansion. How did it change gameplay for you?

I actually got to play. To see every dungeon, to try out everything - before this xpac, I never had a consistent group to try anything, and I’ve never been great at building up a group on my own for content… or at least I wasn’t at the time. LFD, and, later, LFR, opened up experiences to me I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, for better or worse, and let me actually see content and experience story - and I am ever about story.

While it has its downside - I do think it contributed to a certain toxicity that persists to this day - it’s still invaluable for actually getting to do content for a lot of people.

What would Today You say to Wrath You?

“Stop being a wus about it and go raid.” Any social game is about the effort you put in to be social and experience things - and there was absolutely no reason I waited as long as I did to become a raider. My crew was (And is) awesome, and absolutely would have helped me get started if I wanted to try earlier than I did -a nd I missed a lot of fun and good times in this and later xpacs for worrying about being ‘good enough’ to hang with folks.

HOw silly that sounds now. :slight_smile:

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I’ve been meaning to get back to this one for days!

Many consider WotLK the pinnacle of WoW expansions and look back at it with unfiltered nostalgia. Does it still live up to that hype?

Yes! Certain expacs were received better than others and still are beloved. LK, Pandaria, Legion… In general, all of those has something outstanding. With LK, it was the long anticipated storyline and unique features. LK was also still extremely popular in Classic.

What were the most innocently n00bish things you did as a baby WoW player? (C’mon, we were still doing dumb things in Wrath.)

Uhh, no? By this time I’d been playing for years.

What do you consider to be your greatest Wrath achievement?

Smoke and Mirrors.
I came over to WrA 2 weeks after the server opened with the determined mindset that I wasn’t going to run a guild again; I just wanted to RP. So, I joined an RP guild. I was good at recruiting, so I got our numbers up and started running RP events. Then the glead decided he didn’t want an RP guild. He wanted a raid guild.

Disappointed, I left. And when I left, so did most of the guild because I was the person they knew. I didn’t ask them to; they just quit and messaged me over a few days to ask if I’d make a guild. Ok, then. I made Smoke and Mirrors and invited the lot of them.

The original idea was it would be RP. But I ended up with some raiders. There were about 6 of us who had raid experience, so not enough to make a raid team. But there was a guild who needed PUGs. And then another. And then another. I made it my business to learn all the raids, all the fights. And at the time, I also learned all the classes, BIS, how to comp raids, etc.

So, my 6 people jumped from team to team to team. And then we found some unguilded raiders who for some reason couldn’t get a spot anywhere. Suddenly we had a team. Then two. Then seven as different raid guilds folded and all these raiders I knew from PUGs had nowhere to go.

We took in RPers, raiders, and a number of PvPers. There was a time when it felt like we taught most of the server to raid.

We did a lot of RP, spending time in Brill or out in the world. And for awhile, Smoke and Mirrors dominated Wintergrasp when we queued together. We’d go in as a team and Cole and Slithals would run it. We had some amazing PvPers. And I took some flak from some un-amazing ones when I said our guild would not graveyard camp the Alliance players and we wouldn’t do /spit. That made soooo many people mad! But most of the good PvPers knew each other at that point. Heck, I can’t count the number of times Xara hid alts in my guild. We didn’t want to make WG so nobody on Alliance side would queue for it. The point was to have fun, not stroke egos.

And then Xara faction-transferred to Alliance and it was on!

At some point late in LK, we surpassed Supremacy to be the biggest guild on the server because everyone wanted their friend to join. And then their friend’s friend would join. And I had a lot of trouble telling people no. We had 12+ officers at the time (one was just around to be a greeter because he was a guy with a funny personality).

All 7 raid teams had all the raids on farm except the Arthas fight. For some reason, none of us could do that fight. There was always someone who couldn’t move with the team or who’d get carried off, etc. What I really should have done was re-comp teams 1 and 2 into 1 team, get Arthas on farm and then rotate others in. But the teams were very tight. Team 1 became friends and team 2 did as well. The camaraderie was amazing. We had guys who’d play sound clips in Vent during breaks, or who’d play pranks on each other. It felt like the friendship was the point, not finishing the raid.

Team 7 was the first to get Arthas down. I still laugh about that to this day. It was run by a 17 year old who asked me if he could pick up his own raid team. I said sure. He wanted Sunday mornings. Why not?

I was online that morning and he was having to PUG in a few people. I hadn’t done ICC that week on Kirsy, so I sat in as heals. And dang it if he didn’t do it!

The other cool thing we did was almost server first on Ruby Sanctum. One of our tanks, Kemp, happened to be in Wyrmrest Temple when it came online. It wasn’t supposed to be online, but it was. I told everyone to clam up and we grabbed the best players we had available. We got in and NO ONE knew. No other raid guilds were there! We got all the way through to the end boss before any other guilds got there, but by that time, several of our raiders had to log. We ended up with people who weren’t ready for the mechanics. Oh well.

The Wrath pre-launch event recreated Vanilla’s Blood Plague but the devs meant for it to happen this time. Got any OOC or IC stories to share about the plague?

Not really. I stood in SW and cleansed people who didn’t want to be turned. There were a lot of people who didn’t consider it fun and were just trying to go about their business. I spent a lot of time helping them out.

Past that, I also took the priest (who wasn’t max level) out to do the rest of the pre-event because there weren’t enough healers for groups. Got the tabard :slight_smile:

The Argent Tournament patch was the first of its kind. What did you love? What did you hate? Would you like to see a patch like this again?

I liked the concept and the design. I was good at jousting but didn’t enjoy it. The location makes a great RP event site!

For better or worse, global Looking for Dungeon (queueing with off-server players) was introduced this expansion. How did it change gameplay for you?

At the time, there was a LFD on-server that was actually very good. It built community and you got to know other players on the server. I made a loooooot of friends that way. Off-server LFD destroyed that completely.

What would Today You say to Wrath You?

It’s all downhill from here.

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Man, I can’t actually answer most of these because I did play but I also was living life and I don’t actually have a lot of these memories. LOL

I encountered my first guild that I actually felt was a family way back then, back on my normal server. But WotLK was also the very first time I attempted RP and fell in love with it.

The Argent Tournament really and truly made me hate life quite a bit, if I’m being honest lol. It felt like such a slog. But I did it and worked my way through getting the reputations for all the races at the time.

LfD was a blessing and a curse. I learned quickly how much I disliked pugs and I would only ever queue if we were queueing as a guild lol.

What I would say to WotLK me is simple: Make sure you keep your boundaries, and make sure you continue to focus on living life outside of Azeroth as well.

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It really was the last hurrah of the old “Mega-dungeons” that defined end game Classic content. Forge of Souls/Pit of Saron/Halls of Reflection were one continuous narrative that you can literally do back-to-back as each dungeon enters into the next. It felt a lot like Dire Maul/Lower-Upper Blackrock Spire.

Forge of Souls remains weird though, since the soul grinders never made sense until the Shadowlands connection and the James Brown boss continues to absolutely baffle me to this day.

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On that topic I also have fond memories of the Quel’Denar (sp? battered hilt?) quest chain. It is one of the last times I remember getting a cool lore-heavy item without it being mandatory like Legion artifacts or extremely gatekept like later legendaries.

I would say “mega dungeons” staggered on a little longer with Cataclysm’s heroics, which were hard, meaningful, and sometimes offered interconnected narratives like the set of time travelling ones. It wasn’t until MoP that dungeons sort of died for me, when there became a huge gulf between the borderline-pointless heroic modes and unfun timed modes and there weren’t many cool dungeon-based narratives.

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I do remember really enjoying the narrative behind FoS/PoS/HoR. I think WotLK was the last time I actually felt like what I did mattered. Now when I do things, it’s hardly ever in order with the story and feels more discombobulated.

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We stopped being “Adventurers” and started being “Champions”. Somehow by making us important to the plot, we stopped having any meaning to the plot.

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What’s funny is this also was something folks complained about — that we saw the Lich King too much and were too important to the plot. WoW has always struggled with how to treat player characters and I don’t think they struck a balance honestly until TWW when Lore characters finally acknowledged our years-long friendship.

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You mean the two year popularity contest between Wrathion and his brother? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Maybe I’m just wired differently LOL. (I am absolutely wired differently, hello autism and ADHD.) But I dunno, I definitely prefer the feeling of accomplishment and that the things I do in a game matter. Maybe that is too much to ask from a MMO overall, but it is an important aspect of gameplay for me.

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That and Anduin introducing us as a long-time friend. My jaw dropped. He finally acknowledged that we’ve been chasing after him and his antics since MoP!

Honestly, I like the approach where we are also a Lore character but part of an ensemble, not the most important character ever. They seem to be finally striking that balance in TWW… it only took 20 years. :stuck_out_tongue:

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For sure. I’m not looking for main character syndrome. Just acknowledgment that I actually helped in something. I do agree, I think TWW is managing to strike the balance. Hopefully it continues.

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