You Want Me To Do WHAT? : GW2

Not so very long ago, either here or in someone's comment thread, I mentioned two things I had no plans on doing in GW2. Things, indeed, that I specifically planned on not doing. The first was sPvP. The second was dailies on the third account that I bought in the recent 75% off sale.

So, naturally, I'm now doing both. The second kind of led into the first, although Jeromai had a little bit to do with it, planting a seed back in this post.

The experience of leveling up a first character on a fresh account these days deserves a post or several of its own, which I may or may not get to at some point. For the moment let's focus on just one of the many, many oddnesses: the Dailies Anet clearly doesn't expect anyone to do.

If a complete newbie, on a complete newbie account, wants to complete his or her dailies and receive the "Daily Completionist" achievement and the ten achievement points that accompany it, he or she gets no choice whatsoever. Completion requires three dailies and three is all you get: do them all or go home.

Excuse me but I'm new here...is this Ascalon?

Each day brings a "choice" of precisely one PvE, one WvW and one PvP daily. As soon as you exit the Tutorial you have immediate access to the achievement window in which they are itemized under "Daily". You also get the daily Log-In reward jiggling away in the bottom corner to draw your attention to the mechanic.

You might well imagine these dailies are something you could get started on right away. You'd be wrong. You can do the PvE one, provided you know where to go and have opened the maps, highly unlikely at level two or three, but as for the other two? Forget it.

A new account is hard-blocked from entering either WvW or PvP by using any of the UI buttons that you might spot via a mouse-over tooltip. Those don't become avaialable until level 18 for WvW and level 22 for PvP. These are also the levels at which your Level Rewards will inform you that you are ready for these activities.

What, then, is the point of dangling that daily carrot in front of the player right at the beginning and then making it as plain as can be that you shouldn't try to reach for it? Fast though leveling is in GW2, few ingenues are going to hit 18 on their first character on the first day. Or the first week, quite possibly. Neither is anyone genuinely new to the game going to know, or discover other than by sheer, blind chance, that you can access both  game modes by going to Lion's Arch, finding the relevant Asura gates there and right-clicking them.

The logic behind making the new player's first few sessions easier to enjoy by offering clearly visible tasks while simultaneously locking them behind obscure access methods escapes me, as does much of ANet's logic. Imagine I was one of those players developers frequently cite, and for whose benefit many of the NPE changes were supposedly implemented, the kind of player who gives up at the first hurdle and never logs in again. Well, let's just say that's one heck of a hurdle you just put in my way.

It doesn't end there either. When you do find and use the Asura Gate to the Heart of the Mists you have to complete a mandatory, if perfunctory, tutorial that seems to have little or no relevance to what actually happens when you get into a PvP map. Then there's the barricade of the sPvP interface itself. To call it confusing and unintuitive would be an understatement.

All must win prizes.

I had to go to the wiki several times before I was able to use that interface effectively and I still don't claim to find it straightforward. I can only imagine that the entry into WvW is just as confusing for anyone who hasn't spent countless hours there. Add to this the unfortunate but salient fact that many WvW players are considerably less than welcoming of "uplevels" and that everyone in every competitive game mode is likely to be intolerant of players, new or old, who are only there to "do their dailies" and you really do have to begin to wonder about the clarity of thought of the people who came up with the whole concept.

As a coherent, considered approach to introducing brand-new players to all the game modes - it sucks. Why not just stick to PvE dailies until there's at least one character on the account that reaches the recommended level for the other game modes? Just finding out where to go for those now they're location-specific would be challenge enough, I'd have thought.

Of course it was only my account and my character that was new to GW2, not me, which
makes for a very lopsided assessment. Things that a real new starter would possibly find frustratingly difficult and confusing I, as an experienced player, found positively bracing. It's a very different experience, for example, trying to solo a yak or a sentry-point as an ungeared uplevel than it is as a Level 80 Bronze Major in full Exotics/Ascended. I had to play a lot smarter and use a lot of cunning. It was a lot of fun.


The PvP (about which I was going to write here but which now may to have to get a post of its own) was entirely new and was pretty confusing but I very much enjoyed it. Whether the rest of my team welcomed having a Level 2 Engineer with almost no gear at all, using pistols with no stats , with only two out of five weapon skills and no utility skills other than a heal and, obviously, no traits is hard to say. No-one complained at me or to me, though, and I was able to hold my own and be fairly useful. I killed people, took points, defended them, all the good stuff.

I didn't die much more than anyone else, either ,as far as I could tell. I'm guessing the group-maker matches people of equivalent rank together so none of us had much idea what we were doing. We must all have been Rabbits together. I even had enough fun that I ran a few matches on my level 80s.

I was enjoying the whole thing so much in fact, the low-level, no choice daily experience, that it was disappointing when I hit level 11 and suddenly my daily horizons expanded to a choice of three from nine. Not for the first time I wished GW2 had some potion or toggle that allowed you to lock your level.

All that and I didn't even get around to mentioning Dragonball.

Happy Wintersday, Skritt-Kickers! : GW2

Wintersday is here again and, with the repairs to Lion's Arch progressing slowly (euphemism for "not happening"), the center of celebrations has shifted to Divinity's Reach. Jennah, Party Queen of Tyria, was never one to miss an opportunity to spend taxpayers' money on having a good time so I doubt Magnus, Kiel or whoever is supposedly in charge of the burned-out wreck that is L.A. needed to ask twice.

All the usual favorites are back for us to ignore enjoy - snowball fights, toys running amok, amateurs who couldn't carry a tune in a blanket giving it plenty on the handbells... Tixx is around somewhere with his airship doing something or other. And like that.

Apparently you can make one of these trees and put it in your Personal Instance
so its Wintersday all year long. I'll get right on that.

There are a few new wrinkles. That "amusing", autonomic, self-aware golem is back with his bucket. This time around he's trading under the name Ho-Ho-Tron which suggests he may be self-aware but he lacks any sense of self-awareness. Also I'm pretty sure he's scamming. As he herds his present-laden cow from one side of the giant hole to the other he makes some comment about doing his community service but didn't he already complete his sentence, at our expense, months ago?

I'd like to be able to claim I was the one posing the moral dilemma rather than making the Katy Perry joke but...

Authenticity aside, he's nothing if not a hard worker. Round and round he goes, surrounded by a jostling pack of players determined to grab for themselves any presents that fall off the cart. Are we any better than the demented skritt who burrow up through the flagstones to steal them? Don't ask me difficult questions when I've got my kicking boots on!

At least they seem to be feeding him well

The oddest addition has to be the new quest. Yes it is a quest. Well what is it then? It's not an event. It's not an achievement. You speak to a Grawl, he tells you to get him something, you go speak to someone who might have it and he wants something else so you go get him that. Then you go back to the Grawl and he comes up with the next thing he wants and so on. That. Is. A. Quest.

It's also ill-considered and incoherent. This Grawl has stolen some Wintersday "ornaments" from a bunch of orphans, ostensibly because he doesn't like the noise they make (I think he means the ornaments but maybe it's the orphans. He's a grawl. Who knows what he means?). All this happens in your personal instance.

Pity you can't say as much for the education.
Just look at that spelling!

Now, if you're a Human, there actually IS an orphanage in your personal instance (just go with it) so there's at least a basis for suspending disbelief. The Quest, however, has to work for all players, so this Grawl and his attendant, ornament-deprived Orphans (actually one orphan, presumably elected by the rest and delegated to speak on their behalf. And his "friend") are lurking in the Personal Instance allocated to each race in lieu of actual housing.

In the case of a Charr player, that means there's a Grawl hiding at the back of a section of The Black Citadel that's positively teeming with heavily-armed Legionaries, many of whom are off-duty and liquored up. With a human child. And a Charr cub, who gets no lines.

Best mob skill ever

How did they get there without being, at best, arrested and, more likely, spit-roasted and eaten or used for target practice? What about that cub? Is he an orphan too? Would it matter even if he was? Wouldn't he just be in a Farhar anyway? Can't ask him - he didn't get a speaking part in this little nativity play. And why in the name of the gods we Charr don't believe in are they hiding in MY house anyway? I don't even have a house! No, don't get me started...

So, things don't get off to the most credible of beginnings and it doesn't improve from there. The Grawl insists on giving clues in some of the most execrable doggerel I have ever read. Yesterday's clue did manage to point to the next part of the quest, handily situated right across the metal gangway from the instance, but today he was rambling on about a place made of flowers.

Hey, Vogons! Better up your game!

The Grove perhaps? No, luckily for me Mrs Bhagpuss already went there and tried that and was able to save me from wasting my time and my silver. In fact you just go to the same place in Black Citadel you went to yesterday. I just gave up trying to make it make sense. It carries on tomorrow (there's a day's wait between stages). Maybe all will become clear in due course. Or it won't. I'm betting on won't.

He followed me home and I'm going to keep him.

As well as new things to do there are lots of new things to get. The familiar wrapping of the presents hides a slew of interesting additions to the usual range of socks and snowflakes. Runes, sigils, tonics and finishers abound. There are already complaints about inventory space being compromised. There was even an inexplicable occurrence where I opened something (I didn't notice what - I was opening so many things just then) and received an item that auto-completed the entire new collection (which I hadn't even started). I got a Skritt mini. Result!. Oh yes - there's a new collection. Did I mention that?

All of this abundance and confusion arrived with the threatened promised revamp of the Daily and Monthly Achievement systems. I was going to do a whole post on that but honestly? I can't be bothered. There's a eleven page thread on the forums about it already, running roughly 50-50 Love It/Hate It. I don't feel either. I just feel meh.

Could you be more specific?

The people who really love it are the ones who were previously doing the dailies just to get the Laurels. Laurels now come automatically through the Monthly, for which you have to do quite literally nothing more than remember to log in. The people who hate it are the ones who enjoyed seeing the daily fill out in the background as they dd whatever they felt like doing. The first lot feel liberated; the second lot feel trapped.

The WvW seem much, much easier than the rest
but maybe that's just me

I'm one of those weirdos who does the dailies because I like doing the dailies. I did prefer the old ones, which offered a lot more choice, but I don't object to the new ones, which are extremely specific. I'll do them as long as I continue to find them amusing and then I'll stop. As for the rewards, I don't spend the sodding Laurels anyway - I have nearly two thousand of them stashed away across the two accounts. The rewards they've attached to each individual achievement are marginally more useful.

As a revamp I'll give it five. Out of ten. It was completely unnecessary from my point of view but I'm sure they have their reasons. Getting everyone to cluster in the same maps so it looks like there are more of us comes to mind...

It might have been better not to have introduced the new system at the exact same time as adding a second set of holiday dailies that do reward a Laurel, though. Not likely that was going to confuse things, was it? Also, the two days of Wintersday dailies we've had so far have been identical. Not sure if that's a co-incidence or whether we'll just get the same half-dozen for the entire season. If so, I think that could get a tad wearing.

I'm begging you, don't make me go to Queensdale any more.

We're asked to perm any five from six but since one's completing the insanely hard Wintersday Jumping Puzzle that's actually five from five as far as this household is concerned. Of the five I can do, the Snowball one is really annoying, albeit simple if Mrs Bhagpuss and I duo it, and the Bell Choir looked to be impossible until I bothered to read a walkthrough and actually pay attention. Now I can do it with my eyes closed although with my ears closed would be preferable.

The remaining three are trivial but I have to wonder along with Mrs Bhagpuss, who, upon being faced with the second, repeated set of tasks, asked "How is this meant to be fun?". I don't really have an answer for that. Fortunately there's still a lot of non-directed content left that is fun, like marching a dozen golems around Fort Aspenwood's borderland and taking all their keeps like we did this afternoon, so I'll just have to make do with that.

And we do have Wintesday in WvW too, you know. We decorate and everything.

In Which I Give Myself A Good Talking To : GW2, EQ2

It's one of the fundamental tenets of massively multiple online roleplaying gaming that everything is subject to revision. The imaginary worlds we pretend to inhabit aren't static. They are meant to grow and alter as though they were real.

We understand that each time we slip on our pixel skins and step out under those familiar, unfamiliar skies something may have changed. In this way it mirrors our lives outside. The walk you take each day is never the same walk. Businesses open and close, the traffic shifts, whole communities change character around us without asking our consent.

For the longest while this was a great part of what attracted me to the form. The mutability. The potential for wonder and surprise. The thrill of the new, the unknown. Of late, though, I find I weary of it all. Instead of yearning for the new, the fresh, the unforeseen, I log in hoping to find things much the same.

The nature and purpose of the changes seem themselves to have changed. Casting back, more than a decade, to a time when rude individuals set up their rough huts across Qeynos Hills and the agents of Bertoxxolous worked secretly in the shadows to bring the plague for the Plaguebringer, in that the long, golden age of mystery and suspense, I had no real understanding of what was happening around me.

Over what seems in memory to be a very long time indeed, a slow, obscure narrative played out, bringing great disruption and a clamor of excitement. Places that had been safe became deadly. Great forces contended but for what prizes it was not ours to know. Opportunities arose for those quick enough to grasp them. Change was all around and it felt right and good and natural.

Why we cannot have nice things: Fig. 1.

Today all change comes forewarned. It arrives on schedule. From the rote formality of the Living Story, inching forward a notch every second Tuesday unless holidays intervene, to the sporadic Issues and Updates of The Secret World or EQ2, anticipated, awaited, advertized and analyzed before ever they are played, little reaches us unheralded.

Change you know is coming is very different from change you don't expect. Even should you choose not to visit websites, click on links, watch Twitch streams and YouTube presentations, open emails or engage with social media, on the day of the Update your characters will certainly receive direct notification inside the game. There is no option to arrive unaware at the point of crisis, to walk in innocence into the line of fire, the way I did the day I became suddenly and fatally aware of the Dark Elven invasion of Firiona Vie.

Change is unavoidable but the greatest changes, while vital, used to be contained. Boxed expansions brought whole new continents to explore but largely left the known lands alone. If you wanted to go on as you had always gone on then that option was open for you to take.

In a geographic sense that remains, largely, true but over the years a miasma of minor and major visual polishes and makeovers has settled on the glories of the past, leaving an unattractive patina, not of neglect but of mismanagement. The endless attempts to update appearances - better textures, new character models, improved graphic engines - often sit on the surface of older games like the fashions of youth on an aging narcissist, fooling no-one but disturbing many.

Once reviled, now revered.

Then there are the repurposings. The villages of Freeport and Qeynos, instanced and questlined; all those new New Player Experiences, those zone revamps that follow no logic or lore beyond that of the extended focus group and the metrics report.

We always had upheaval, of course. How many times did Splitpaw change hands; or Grobb? Even ailing worlds like Telon, where one might have expected the tide of change to flow slowly if at all, saw heavy-handed tinkering along its fringes, time and again. If change feels more ponderous, less organic now, perhaps it's merely that the stardust is off our eyes.

Even when the terrain remains unaltered, to revisit often feels false because our characters do not. Beneath their surfaces writhe changes wrought by hands other than their, or our, own: adjustments made by the Gods of Design, who bring endless alteration to the physical laws of the worlds in which our characters and their own frangible, powerless Gods reside.

Through no exercise of theirs our characters strengthen. Unborn imaginary generations outstrip the fantasies of their fancied ancestors. Learning curves flatten, enemies weaken, skills and abilities are handed out as of right. Weapons that would have graced a knight in a former age become fit only for farmhands. Nothing stays the same.

Well, why should it? Time moves on, the world changes, you can never go home again and all the rest of that dismal, defeated claptrap. Only...

To be retained for F2P players as a default 50% xp reduction. Thanks for that.

Recently I read several proofs of novels to be published this winter and next spring. They were all very good and they were all very bleak. I was exhausted both by novelty and despair so I went looking for solace in the familiar. Instead of another new novel I picked out an old favorite and began re-reading. Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. Everything was familiar. Everything was in its place. Some things remain immutable. Time runs off them like rain. You can go home there and they have to take you in.

Were I to begin to feel, like Stargrace, weary of MMOs yet still not weary of gaming I could, fathomably, return to an offline favorite and find it exactly as I remembered. Perhaps that might be a little harder to do than picking up an old copy of a book; complex hardware mitigates against reusability, over time. Not impossible, however; just harder. In MMOs, though, there truly is no going back.

Next week the daily achievement system in GW2 gets yet another reset and WvW gains a new ruleset for a month. The two things I most enjoy doing in that game right now will no longer be what they were. Also next week EQ2 implements a radical overhaul of both the Dungeon Maker and AA systems, something that will bring profound change to the game experience of just about everyone playing there.

Like it or not change is on the way; change followed by change followed by change. Yes, I weary of it. Yes, I often wonder if I wouldn't be happier playing an MMO where nothing ever changed. Well, wonder away. That MMO doesn't exist. It never has and it never will.

Our boats drift with the current, borne onward ceaselessly into the future. Tomorrow is always another day. Get used to it.

Double The Fun : GW2

One aspect of my GW2 metagame that I don't mention as often as I might is the fact that I play two accounts. I don't multi-box, even though it is allowed under the rules, as this official ruling on the forums comprehensively clarifies. That's not why I got two accounts in the first place.

It was less than a month after launch that I decided I needed more character slots than the five that came with the box. I could have paid to add more to my existing account as and when needed but it was obvious that if I did that I would end up paying more than the cost of buying another copy of the game. So I bought another copy of the game.

As the direction and emphasis of GW2's development has twisted and turned that decision has lost little of its luster. ANet's controversial decision to add a new tier of equipment, Ascended, appeared initially to pose a potential problem, but I dealt with that very effectively by simply not bothering to get any.

The addition of a separate pool of experience and purchased abilities for World vs World was a little more awkward. At first, when WXP and ranks were tallied on a by-character basis, having two accounts felt like an advantage. After all, every character was in direct competition with every other for those points so having one designated WvW character on each account allowed me to play two classes in the Mists without feeling I was undercutting the progress of either. With all WvW functionality now converted to an account basis, though, I do occasionally find myself totaling all my ranks across two accounts and thinking how many extra abilities I'd be able to buy if they were all on the same team.

Here's a clue: it looks nothing like a wolf

On balance, though, after two years I am still very pleased that I have two accounts. Not only does it mean I have double the bank slots and the extremely useful ability to mail things to myself (seriously, why is that not just allowed on a single account like it is in every other MMO?) it also means I get to do everything twice.

I love doing my dailies in GW2. I really enjoy it. Unless I'm away on holiday I do them every single day. Not because I want anything they give as the 1300 or so unspent Laurels across the two accounts amply demonstrates. No, I just like doing them and being able to do them twice every day adds enormous value to the game.

Even better than double dailies are double helpings of the Living Story. For the whole of Season One I did just about every single stage all the way through, twice, including all of the meta-achievements. Better yet, it meant that I was always able to play through the whole of each episode for the first time without worrying about missing anything. Then, when I'd had my spoiler-free, immersive experience I was able to go back and do it all again, knowing what to expect.

Being able to repeat all the steps allowed me to judge my initial, unprepared reactions against my later, informed ones. Very useful indeed when it comes to writing blog posts and taking the necessary screenshots. After all, if I was writing a review of a book, I wouldn't expect to do so without at least re-reading certain passages if not the entire text.

Told you.

 And now here we are in Living Story Season Two. Suddenly all the LS content is repeatable. Has that reduced the value or attraction of maintaining two accounts? Well, it might have if it wasn't for the change to how Living Story Achievements work.

The main motivation for repeating the instanced content has been placed squarely on these "challenging" tasks and as the screenshot of my LS2 Achievement Panel shows, it really hasn't clicked with me. I don't like the new type of achievements. Not at all. And if I don't like content in MMOs I don't do it.

You could argue that all achievements are artificial but these feel a lot more bogus than most simply because they require such premeditated intent. It's one thing for an achievement to pop up because you just killed your one-thousandth Woozle but it's another thing entirely to buy a Woozle farm, breed a thousand Woozles and then kill them. Or something.  It just feels wrong, alright?


I also don't like how nit-pickingly precise they are. They have no margin for error. They require you, for example, never to let a certain kind of attack hit you or not to allow any of a particular kind of NPC to die. I don't like negative achievements of that stripe. I much prefer positive ones that require me to kill or collect all the things, achievements where the limiting factor is my patience and determination not my manual dexterity or good fortune, the kind of achievements that can fill themselves in organically as I go about my regular business of, say, killing and skinning Woozles.

And likely to stay that way.

And another thing! It's a bit like the first thing, I'll grant you, but subtly different. I don't like the underlying concept of repeating instanced, narrative-based content specifically to gain achievements. It feels cheesy. I don't even feel comfortable dying and respawning in a story-based instance because it feels too computer-gamey so going back in to replay sequences for personal gain was never going to sit well.

Fortunately, so far in three episodes I've made it all the way through without dying each time on my initial run. Okay, Rox had to revive me more than once on Duke Barradin's Statue but hey, she's my team-mate. That's allowed! Twice through each instance has been plenty though. I shudder at the thought of doing them much more than that. As the Season rolls on I can't say that I won't cherry-pick the odd, quick or easy achievement here or replay a particularly enjoyable section on several characters there. I'm neither a saint nor a sanctified roleplayer after all. But on the whole having just two bites at this particular cherry feels about right.

As ArenaNet modify and morph their game into something further and further away from what it was back at launch the day may come when having two accounts feels like a burden rather than a bonus but that day's not here yet nor even on the horizon as far as I can see. Should it ever come then maybe one team will have to retire gracefully. Sure. Like that's going to happen...

Gold? Don't Talk To Me About Gold! : GW2

"You’ve got the brawn, I’ve got the brains / Let’s make lots of money"

Neil Tennant probably wasn't thinking about MMOs but that about sums up the opportunities on offer in most of them. Pick up your club, march through the city gates, find things weaker than you, hit them repeatedly until they fall over, then take all their stuff and sell it. It's either that or find out who's buying what, work out where to get it then either make what's selling or sell what's making what's selling to whoever's making what sells. Hunt or gather; your choice.

Generally the fastest way to bootstrap a fresh character in any MMO, new or old, is to gather raws and sell them to crafters. Doing your regular quests and general slaughtering will just about keep your head above water but selling ore to armorsmiths will make you rich, although the more industrious, long-term planner may prefer to keep the materials and learn how to use them. Those crafters doing the buying must be raking it in somewhere down the road, right?

Oh, how we hate you, Globby Gloop

Well, maybe. In GW2 money is tight. Really, really tight. I can't remember the last time I played a mainstream MMO where my first character stayed so poor for so long. At first I thought it was down to the continued absence of the Trading Post, but now the Black Lion has its act together sufficiently to keep the doors open most of the time that turns out not to be the case.

Partly it's because creatures in Tyria drop far less coin and and their body parts are worth much less than in just about any other imaginary world I can think of. The universal Glob of Globby Gloop (stupidest standard drop I have ever seen, by the way, and one about which I complained bitterly in beta, obviously to no avail) sells for 3 copper at level one. By level 50 it's selling for 9 copper. Three times bugger all is still bugger all. Even magic weapons at level 50 don't reach the dizzy heights of two silver a time if you offer them to a vendor. When it comes to money-making opportunities, brawn does not appear to be the way to go.

Saville Row, here I come

Tobold was complaining that "There simply doesn't appear to be a point to crafting in Guild Wars 2". Many people put him straight in the comments - crafting gives a lot of experience, is fun and relaxing, has "end-game" relevance and so on - but his substantive point, that you can't make any money by crafting isn't actually true anyway. It is true that you can't make as much money by selling the finished item as you would have done by selling the bits you used to make it, but the crafted gear I'm making sells fast and consistently on the Trading Post for two to three times the price a vendor would give me for it.

If I was adamantly opposed to doing any crafting at all I would be considerably richer than I am, although less poor might be a better way to put it. As far as I can tell there's no subtle motivator baked into GW2 that pushes you into crafting. It remains one of the few realms of activity that can safely be ignored by anyone not actively interested in taking it up. Gathering my own mats, crafting probably isn't a net loss and I am smartly dressed in clothes I sewed myself, but had I sold those mats to crafters and bought my gear I'd be a lot richer and better-dressed yet.

Is this what you want? I think not.

If the game design doesn't particularly encourage crafting, gathering's a very different kettle of cod. Unlike most MMOs, GW2 does expect you to gather plants, chop trees and mine ore. If you resolutely refuse to do so not only will you miss out on a sizable chunk of very easy xp, you will never complete a Daily Achievement because for each of those you need to gather twenty items. Do that every day and you'll soon get the habit. (There's a nice guide to Daily Achievements here, by the way - did you know that rabbits, armadillos and other critters count for both Daily Kills and Kill Variety? I didn't until I read it there).

What with that spur and the magnificent non-competitive nature of nodes, gathered materials, especially ore and wood, are extremely common on the Trading Post and I'm not sure whether the effort required to fill a stack would be worth the reward. The riches on offer to those prepared to go low-level grubbing in WoW or EQ2 may be missing from GW2.

In a game where xp is easier to come by than money I wonder whether the better strategy isn't just to level poor and get rich later. There must be more money at eighty, mustn't there?