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Test Subject
#26 Old 25th Jun 2019 at 11:22 PM
It honestly wouldn't bother me if there didn't seem to be a loading screen every 5 minutes in Ts4 and why do all my sims have the same whims?

Honestly, Ts4 feels repetitive and boring and on top of that, loading screen, loading screen.

And even then, what does EA do instead of fixing the problem, "oh I know, let's disable whims by default."

Sims on Ts3 actually wish for diffrent things which is a big deal to me as I mostly play by my sims wishes.
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Theorist
#27 Old 26th Jun 2019 at 12:54 PM
Quote: Originally posted by jje1000
I'm still perpetually amazing by all the types of buildings I can make with CaST + the stencil remover

How much can you modify buildings with that? Can you give an example? I thought that was just for removing logos on t-shirts and stuff

#BlairWitchPetition
TS3 NEEDS: TENNIS COURTS > BUSES > PIGS/SHEEP
Can't find stuff in build and buy mode? http://www.nexusmods.com/thesims3/mods/1/?
Mad Poster
#28 Old 26th Jun 2019 at 2:01 PM
Yeah, same. I've never really tried it.

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( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Mad Poster
#29 Old 26th Jun 2019 at 6:03 PM
Quote: Originally posted by tizerist
How much can you modify buildings with that? Can you give an example? I thought that was just for removing logos on t-shirts and stuff


It's the most useful in getting stencils off of objects so you can use them outside of their original intended purposes- for instance I think that Late Night has a chalk bar menu that becomes a nice little wall medallion once you take the stencil off. Another one would be turning a painting into a wall grate.

There's lots of experimentation needed to see what works best, but the good thing is that you can save the objects as presets for easy use, and the effects carry across worlds and different people's games (even people without the mod).

Instructor
#30 Old 27th Jun 2019 at 1:33 AM Last edited by grandma_on_a_kiling_spree : 28th Jun 2019 at 9:50 PM.
Sims 3 and 4 are equally good but I still prefer sims 3. It's better because it's more customizable when it comes to worlds and buildings (but I loved the sims 2 feature to have neighbours). It sucks that they decide 100% where your sims live, I don't want all my sims to live in suburbs or beautiful buildings, I want some to live in buildings like the user above posted. The open world is awesome but it lags even on the best PCs and plus it limits the quality of the animations like getting in the car, I noticed that they just converted many anims from sims 2 but making them more simple. Sims 4 is better at that. Also what I like in sims 4 is that you aren't limited to a single world, the other ones are like an another universe unlike sims 3 that's exactly like that. Sims 4 is better for parties because sims actually have fun, drink and the game allows alot of sims on a single lot. Color wheels in s3. Sims 3 men are more attractive if made properly IMO. Sorry if it's kinda unorganized.

Edit: What I say wrong? I thought those were popular opinions.
Instructor
#31 Old 27th Jun 2019 at 2:00 AM
^ I agree with you so much on the game deciding where your sims live in 4. You can't have a rural farmhouse in 4 because every lot is surrounded by a cheery fake town backdrop that always reminds me of Propaganda Village. Customization is key, for me.
Instructor
#32 Old 27th Jun 2019 at 2:29 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Eronel
^ I agree with you so much on the game deciding where your sims live in 4. You can't have a rural farmhouse in 4 because every lot is surrounded by a cheery fake town backdrop that always reminds me of Propaganda Village. Customization is key, for me.

Their European style town is absolutely beautiful and it reminds me of home, but i hate that you are also limited to few lots and those aren't the row buildings, just oddly placed lawn in the middle of the town center surrounded by row houses.
They had a chance to make a gta styled neighborhood in get famous but they still placed a lawn that doesn't match with other "houses". Meanwhile with Create a World everything mentioned above is possible.
Mad Poster
#33 Old 27th Jun 2019 at 3:36 PM
Windenburg's great, I think it's nicely balanced between TS4's cartoonish fantasyland aesthetic and an actual, livable Central-Northern European city. It vaguely looks like one of the old Hanseatic cities, though EA would never do enough research to know that. I personally find that doing research is important even when you don't aim for realism. You gather up a variety of looks and styles, and then create your own based on what you think will realistically come out best. I found that out very quickly when I started recreating times and places. You'll never get it 100% right, and you shouldn't want to, but you still need to know exactly what you're working with.

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( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Undead Molten Llama
#34 Old 27th Jun 2019 at 11:21 PM
Quote: Originally posted by grandma_on_a_kiling_spree
The open world is awesome but it lags even on the best PCs...


This I have to disagree with. It's a common accusation leveled against TS3, but the root of the issue is fixable, although it requires mods. (Which it seems that some TS3 players are really afraid of for some bizarre reason, but that's a different issue.) The lag is caused mostly by bad routing, sims and vehicles getting stuck in places, yet the game still expends resources to push them to do things, which they can't do because they're stuck and it goes around in circles, with the issue piling up over time, causing more lag the longer you play. There are other issues -- like the game generating too many vehicles in general -- but that's the main culprit. Some EA worlds -- like Bridgeport and Isla Paradiso -- are especially bad in this regard. However, people have shared replacement versions of these worlds that fix the routing issues. Installing those combined with using two mods -- NRAAS's Overwatch and ErrorTrap -- eliminates much if not all of the lag, I find.

And before I'm accused of having some kind of supercomputer: I play TS3 (with all EPs) on a machine that is certainly not the "best." Specifically, it's bottlenecked by a suboptimal (for TS3) Core2Duo processor (one that TS2, my "main game," likes) and while I will experience lag in rendering when playing TS3 -- mostly because my GPU is newer, faster, and far more powerful than the CPU and sends it info faster than the poor thing can process it; it has nothing to do with the game -- I do not experience lag in actual game play, so long as I have used fixed versions of EA worlds (or custom worlds where the creator was careful about routing) and those two NRAAS mods. Problem solved.

Quote:
...and plus it limits the quality of the animations like getting in the car, I noticed that they just converted many anims from sims 2 but making them more simple.


Which is probably a good thing, frankly. TS2's pretty notorious for its routing dances involving, for one example, getting multiple Sims into one vehicle in a timely manner. Frankly, I'd rather have the simplified versions and skip the routing dances, thank you. TS3 has enough routing issues as it is without adding more just to have some animations of Sims getting into cars.

Quote:
Also what I like in sims 4 is that you aren't limited to a single world, the other ones are like an another universe unlike sims 3 that's exactly like that.


Maybe if you're mod-phobic. But if you're not, there's NRAAS Traveler. Which opens up, forgive the pun, whole new worlds. It exploits programming introduced for World Adventures such that you can freely move your Sims between worlds and rotate between worlds to play families in all of them. It pretty much makes it just like the TS2 "main neighborhood with subhoods" structure. Granted, you can't do that without mods, but that was the price paid for the open world that evolves as one living unit rather than discrete, segregated bits. The open world was TS3's main gimmick so of course it's going to make sacrifices for it. TS4's main gimmick was apparently more individual-Sim-related (the multitasking and the "emotions" and all that) than whole-world-related, so the sacrifices made are different.

Like I said initially in this thread, it's all apples and oranges and all subjective. Which game you'll like best is merely a question of which gimmick you like best. And the gimmick you'll like best is going to be the one that prioritizes what you, specifically, like to do in a Sims game, independent of what anyone else likes. Which is to me what makes discussions like this rather pointless. (It inevitably boils down to: "Well, I like this! -- Oh yeah? Well, I like THIS! -- Well...um, OK then.") For me, the game that best suits my priorities and likes/dislikes is TS2, modded out the wazoo and prettied up with "modern" CC. This is because, overall, what I really like in a Sims game is a blank-canvas "sandbox" where I can create neighborhoods/worlds from the ground up and control every aspect of them, easily playing every Sim that exists in a neighborhood, if I want to. So for me, TS2 is the obvious choice. Lately, however, I've been playing TS3, too, heavily modded to make it more TS2-like, so that I can enjoy TS3's pretty scenery and its gameplay elements that don't exist in TS2. And it's still customizable in a limited way via Edit World. (And if I could get Create-A-World to run and learn how to use it, then I'd be golden, but so far I haven't succeeded in getting it to run.) I've never touched TS4, but the fact that you can't build your own environments or even really customize the ones you're given makes me completely uninterested in it. I won't rag on it or anything because that's just stupid, but I know it's not a game I'd enjoy because it doesn't prioritize what I like to do. Simple as that. And that's OK because obviously other people DO like it and that's wonderful for them. (I mean that sincerely; I'm not being condescending.) I've got TS2 and TS3 to play, so I'm good, regardless.

I'm mostly found on (and mostly upload to) Tumblr these days because, alas, there are only 24 hours in a day.
Muh Simblr! | An index of my downloads on Tumblr.
Instructor
#35 Old 28th Jun 2019 at 10:35 PM
Quote: Originally posted by iCad
This I have to disagree with. It's a common accusation leveled against TS3, but the root of the issue is fixable, although it requires mods. (Which it seems that some TS3 players are really afraid of for some bizarre reason, but that's a different issue.) The lag is caused mostly by bad routing, sims and vehicles getting stuck in places, yet the game still expends resources to push them to do things, which they can't do because they're stuck and it goes around in circles, with the issue piling up over time, causing more lag the longer you play. There are other issues -- like the game generating too many vehicles in general -- but that's the main culprit. Some EA worlds -- like Bridgeport and Isla Paradiso -- are especially bad in this regard. However, people have shared replacement versions of these worlds that fix the routing issues. Installing those combined with using two mods -- NRAAS's Overwatch and ErrorTrap -- eliminates much if not all of the lag, I find.


I agree, i'm not really into detailed stuff in sims, just stating my opinion. I'll download ErrorTrap and I already have Overwatch. I have an year old laptop Win10 64bit with 8RAM, so It is kinda my fault for my game lagging (it's still very much playable) because my current family lives in Alpine County with about 5 eps and many CAS CC, not to mention that the city has more than 100 sims. Honestly, what mostly irritates me is that I can't throw parties and or any other decent as well as my sims just standing and not reacting when commanded to go somewhere. But i still think that sims 4 is better by just having a certain open area because you don't need the whole world non stop, it's not GTA. I look from time to time a world that has everything like center, nature,beach, suburbs,middle class and poor neighborhoods as well as a countryside to replace Alpine County. I hadn't seen a medium sized world that has that, so yeah. But I might try the Traveler mod and keep everyone living in normal sized worlds. I wouldn't say that i'm afraid of mods, but rather that I don't know a lot of mods that actually help with the games performance. I used to download necessary mods like crazy and fuck up my game.

Quote: Originally posted by iCad
Which is probably a good thing, frankly. TS2's pretty notorious for its routing dances involving, for one example, getting multiple Sims into one vehicle in a timely manner. Frankly, I'd rather have the simplified versions and skip the routing dances, thank you. TS3 has enough routing issues as it is without adding more just to have some animations of Sims getting into cars.


I experienced lagging in sims 2 as a tween with an old computer that kept download cc uncontrollably but honestly, never have I experienced anything bad with the cars. I only got some game crashes when visiting night clubs.

Quote: Originally posted by iCad
Maybe if you're mod-phobic. But if you're not, there's NRAAS Traveler. Which opens up, forgive the pun, whole new worlds. It exploits programming introduced for World Adventures such that you can freely move your Sims between worlds and rotate between worlds to play families in all of them. It pretty much makes it just like the TS2 "main neighborhood with subhoods" structure. Granted, you can't do that without mods, but that was the price paid for the open world that evolves as one living unit rather than discrete, segregated bits. The open world was TS3's main gimmick so of course it's going to make sacrifices for it. TS4's main gimmick was apparently more individual-Sim-related (the multitasking and the "emotions" and all that) than whole-world-related, so the sacrifices made are different.


Said it in the previous paragraph about the Traveller . Honestly, I was exited about the open world since in sims 2 you were literally trapped in a bubble, the reason in my late sims 2 days I mostly played apartments. Sims 4 did a great job at multitasking and emotions, but I sill have a feeling the game misses many things considering that it has been 5 years and a new sims game should have been released while they just recently started releasing more eps.

I just wanted to share my opinion and I know that it's pointless because non of the games is perfect to my taste, which is okay. I don't know why people were pissed and sarcastic in the beginning of this thread, it's a good thing to do when you want to waste some time lol.
Undead Molten Llama
#36 Old 29th Jun 2019 at 11:02 PM
Quote: Originally posted by grandma_on_a_kiling_spree
I agree, i'm not really into detailed stuff in sims, just stating my opinion. I'll download ErrorTrap and I already have Overwatch. I have an year old laptop Win10 64bit with 8RAM, so It is kinda my fault for my game lagging (it's still very much playable) because my current family lives in Alpine County with about 5 eps and many CAS CC, not to mention that the city has more than 100 sims.


I'll bet it's that 8GB of RAM that's bottlenecking you. Win10 is RAM whore and TS3 is, too, especially TS3 + EPs + big-ass worlds. Put them together and you're probably gonna need more than 8GB. Especially if you don't have a dedicated graphics card in that laptop and the graphics chip has to share that RAM, too. My Simming machine is a desktop and it only has 8GB, too, which is all it can have. (I use deliberately old hardware, to appease the 15-year-old TS2 ), but it runs Win7, which isn't as RAM-greedy nor as memory-leaky as Win10. And it has a dedicated graphics card with 4GB of its own RAM, so it's not dipping into the system RAM, too. Hardware does matter, in the end, if you're on the low end. (And EA's system requirements for the game are just disingenuous, which doesn't help. They make people think they can run an all-EPs game on a machine that really can't handle such a thing.) My own bottleneck is the machine's CPU, which causes TS3 to run a bit slowly sometimes, but that's not the game's fault. It's my fault for playing it on a machine I've "optimized" for an old game. And with fixed worlds and mods, it's not bad at all. Certainly not unplayable like, say, an un-fixed Isla Paradiso played in an unmodded game.

Quote:
Honestly, what mostly irritates me is that I can't throw parties and or any other decent as well as my sims just standing and not reacting when commanded to go somewhere.


I get that too, sometimes, if there are a lot of Sims on the lot and especially if someone (or a lot of someones) has to change outfits to suit the kind of party. Looking at HWMonitor when it happens, I can tell it's because the CPU's struggling to keep up. I find that if I pause the game for a couple of seconds, it gives the CPU a chance to complete the computations without new ones coming in for a moment, so it has time to "catch up" and then when I resume the game things run as they should. But, I neither throw nor attend parties in-game much, so it's not a big deal to me. Sometimes I'll get a Sim standing there too long before changing into a work outfit, though, so again I just pause the game for a few seconds, after which they change their outfit and and off they go.

Quote:
But i still think that sims 4 is better by just having a certain open area because you don't need the whole world non stop, it's not GTA.


I'm actually not the biggest fan of the whole open world thing, which is why TS3 isn't my favorite of the games. I actually prefer TS2's "compartmentalization," but I've tweaked my TS2 game in various ways so that it very much looks like an open world, so I don't feel claustrophobic. The open world, on the other hand, usually just overwhelms me and I feel out of control, which is uncomfortable for me. It could simply be because I'm not used it -- I've owned TS3 since it came out but have never played it as much as I'm currently playing it -- and I just need to come up with some better Sim management strategies, but for the most part I kind of still play TS3 more like TS2, without leaving their home lots a lot, so my Sims end up being homebodies and hermits.

Quote:
I look from time to time a world that has everything like center, nature,beach, suburbs,middle class and poor neighborhoods as well as a countryside to replace Alpine County. I hadn't seen a medium sized world that has that, so yeah. But I might try the Traveler mod and keep everyone living in normal sized worlds. I wouldn't say that i'm afraid of mods, but rather that I don't know a lot of mods that actually help with the games performance. I used to download necessary mods like crazy and fuck up my game.


I feel ya. With my suboptimal CPU, I generally stick to small or medium-sized worlds, and you're right that it's hard to find one of those that incorporates everything from all EPs. (I like dive lots, dangit!! I'm also weird, from what I've read, in that I like the Showtime careers and want to have all the venues for them somewhere.) So, I gave up on that and use Traveler to link several different worlds together rather than trying to find one world that both does it all and that won't give my Simming machine's poor CPU an aneurysm. Because that's a very tall order. So, I have one smaller world that's more city-like, where the Showtime types and the socialites and the younger folks generally end up, and then there'll be one that's rural/agricultural, where the farmers and horse ranchers and vintners and such live, and then there'll be the cutesy suburb where the soccer moms and 2.5 kids live, and then there'll be several linked worlds for vacations, though ALL of them can be used for that. I do try to keep them all the same sort of environment/climate, so that in my head I can pretend they're all one big world, without the things I don't like about playing giant worlds. (It's not just technical issues that make me not like them much; I'm also not fond of it taking sim-hours for a sim to go from one part of the map to another, for instance.) Yeah, that means that Sims will be more "distant" from each other, but if I want them to mingle, then it's just a quick Traveler hop to a different world. It works for me. You should definitely look into Traveler, from what you've said. Splitting up a big world definitely takes some of the stress off a struggling machine, yet you can still have All The Things in one save.

Quote:
I experienced lagging in sims 2 as a tween with an old computer that kept download cc uncontrollably but honestly, never have I experienced anything bad with the cars. I only got some game crashes when visiting night clubs.


No, it's not crashing or anything. It's....Say you've got a family of five -- two parents, three kids -- plus a dog. You decide they're all going to a park for the day, so you direct them get into the car and go. It often goes like this: Parent A gets behind the wheel. Parent B goes to get into the passenger side, but wait! Kid 1 is routed to go there. So instead, Parent B circles the car (usually the long way) to get into one of the back doors....where Kid 2 is routed to go. So, they go back to the front passenger door, into which Kid 1 has successfully disappeared. But wait! Now the dog's routed to get in that door, so back to the rear doors Parent B goes....which is also where Kid 3 has been routed. So Parent B goes back to the front passenger door, into which the dog has now disappeared and finally, FINALLY!, after about 2 sim-hours have passed, they can get into the car and they can go. And then they have to go through the same dance in order to go home. It's not so bad if it's one or two Sims, but if there's five or six...Yeah, not so good. Now imagine this in TS3, where there's already an issue of Sims who'll stand around tapping their foot for hours, waiting for routing paths to clear. No, thanks. I'm happy with Sims teleporting into cars. Much less headache-inducing.

Quote:
I just wanted to share my opinion and I know that it's pointless because non of the games is perfect to my taste, which is okay. I don't know why people were pissed and sarcastic in the beginning of this thread, it's a good thing to do when you want to waste some time lol.


Oh, I'm totally good with adult discussion and comparing/contrasting. Sure, it's been done to death, but sometimes new things are said. I'll yak until the cows come home. (Obviously! ) I had a problem with the title of the thread. I don't know if the OP intended it to sound like bait, but...Well, it's pretty darn bait-y, given that it assumes that TS3 is somehow inherently better than TS4 and we're supposed to give reasons why. Neither game is inherently better. They're just different, with different strengths and weaknesses. And I'm just not into juvenile arguing about which is "better," the apple or the orange.

I'm mostly found on (and mostly upload to) Tumblr these days because, alas, there are only 24 hours in a day.
Muh Simblr! | An index of my downloads on Tumblr.
Top Secret Researcher
#37 Old 30th Jun 2019 at 1:13 AM
I'm playing sims 3 on ultra settings with all EPs and most SPs, over 1GB of CC/Mods and it runs almost like base game on my 4GB RAM, 2.8 GHz CPU, 1 GB VRAM Graphics card. The only thing that I have to fix it... nraas mods and few animation/routing overrides. People accusing sims 3 of running like shit just never bothered fixing their game or allowing it to use more ram. And lets not forget that sims 4 is now into shit performance territory as well. Simulation lag is so much for me that even enjoyable moments of that game (which are rare, still) turn frustrating quickly.
Scholar
#38 Old 30th Jun 2019 at 2:09 AM
Some quests for TS4 players. Complete them all and you are the best TS4 player.

1. See those cars on the roads? Buy one and drive it.
2. Oh, see that house in the distance, go there and visit it.
3. Wait until you see your neighbour sim leave their house.
4. Or wait until you see your neighbour sim arrive at their house.
5. Try to match the colour of windows and doors.
6. Make a sim hate your sim and watch them using angry interactions with each other on their own.
7. Make your sim chat and eat without leaving their chair.
8. Oh look the neighbours have harvestables in their garden. Steal them by avoiding a loading screen.
9. Turn on free will, queue up 3 actions and watch your sim do them while you switch to a different sim in the household.
10. Send one of your sims to the gym while you keep playing with a different sim in their home.

Ask me any time for more challenging TS4 quests!
Lab Assistant
#39 Old 30th Jun 2019 at 8:42 AM
Quote: Originally posted by mixa97sr
I'm playing sims 3 on ultra settings with all EPs and most SPs, over 1GB of CC/Mods and it runs almost like base game on my 4GB RAM, 2.8 GHz CPU, 1 GB VRAM Graphics card. The only thing that I have to fix it... nraas mods and few animation/routing overrides. People accusing sims 3 of running like shit just never bothered fixing their game or allowing it to use more ram. And lets not forget that sims 4 is now into shit performance territory as well. Simulation lag is so much for me that even enjoyable moments of that game (which are rare, still) turn frustrating quickly.

How well does your game run on large areas with lots of items (like tombs) or lots with a lot of sims?
I also have 4 GB RAM, a 3.30GHz CPU and a 3 GB graphics card, but even with Nraas mods, world fixes
and only 4 EPs with no SPs and most settings on medium my game runs frustratingly slow when on those kind of lots. (But it runs nicely when there's only a few sims and the lot isn't very large.)

I also have 290 MB of default replacements, 70 MB of normal mods and 1 GB of CC.
Top Secret Researcher
#40 Old 30th Jun 2019 at 10:49 AM
It runs perfectly well on those types of lot too. I was, until recently, scared to have detailed lots set to 8 but a month ago I set that setting to max and my game loaded all the neighboring lots in like 6 seconds... it is honestly really really weird how my game runs that well on this weak PC. Tombs run so smooth for some reason, whole worlds that you visit (WA worlds, uni world, future world) run better than the home world for me.

Did you unpark your CPU cores? Did you allow the game to use more than 2GB of ram and set the maximum amount of ram that game can use to 4GB in the ini file? Did you put the game process to realtime priority in the task manager? I hope you are not running chrome or other memory intensive app in the background, especially hope you are not running more of them.
Lab Assistant
#41 Old 30th Jun 2019 at 11:31 AM
Quote: Originally posted by mixa97sr
It runs perfectly well on those types of lot too. I was, until recently, scared to have detailed lots set to 8 but a month ago I set that setting to max and my game loaded all the neighboring lots in like 6 seconds... it is honestly really really weird how my game runs that well on this weak PC. Tombs run so smooth for some reason, whole worlds that you visit (WA worlds, uni world, future world) run better than the home world for me.

Did you unpark your CPU cores? Did you allow the game to use more than 2GB of ram and set the maximum amount of ram that game can use to 4GB in the ini file? Did you put the game process to realtime priority in the task manager? I hope you are not running chrome or other memory intensive app in the background, especially hope you are not running more of them.


I haven't unparked my CPU cores. My game's process priority is currently on normal so I will definitely try this. I don't use any other programs when playing the game, including browsers. I also haven't let the game use more than 2GB, but is it really okay to let it to be able to use all of your RAM?
Mad Poster
#42 Old 30th Jun 2019 at 11:34 AM
Quote: Originally posted by mithrak_nl
Some quests for TS4 players. Complete them all and you are the best TS4 player.

Let's make this an actual challenge. Start your stopwatches. If you are unable to complete a step due to being a TS4 player, add one minute to your time.

1. Wait for the first car to drive by your lot. Buy one yourself. If you are for any reason unable to do this, buy the cheapest car in your catalog.
2. Visit your neighbor's house.
3. Go back to your own home and wait until you see your neighbor leaving theirs.
4. Go back in and steal their TV.
5. Wait for the police to arrive. Run.
6. Oh dear, is that a meteorite headed for your neighbor's house?
7. Call the fire department.
8. Move to Mexico.

insert signature here
( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Forum Resident
#43 Old 1st Jul 2019 at 6:48 PM
An other fact is when your game crashes, you won't play the same you used to play before, because the sims 3 has N numbers scenarios.

I speak French only. If my statements are harsh, rude for you, that's not intentional. I just think Different due to my Language and my Culture.
But truly, I am open-minded than you think of.
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