I’m glad I’ve left the UK because of the rising taxes. “New” Labour think the best way to dissuade people to do things is tax or fine them on it, and we’ve had some real doozies in the past. The person who was fined £60 for putting the “wrong” recyclable item in the “wrong” bin (even though both items were recyclable); the “bin tax” whereby bins are weighed and the homeowner taxed based on their weight… but now we get to something even more bizarre:
This BBC Video tells the story of one man who likes to recycle. In fact, he’s so efficient at it, that he recycles more than he has bin space for. So he approached the local council to ask about a second bin. Sure, said the local council, we can sell you another bin – for a whopping £60 (notice how that number keeps cropping up?). The guy quite rightly said that was an outrageous price, and he’d buy one over the internet. Well, you can do that, said the local council – but if you do, we won’t empty it.
And indeed they don’t. The bin men have been instructed to NOT empty that one bin, purely because it’s not been purchased from that particular council at its vast markup price.
I thought the government WANTED to encourage people to recycle?
So let’s get this straight. If you don’t recycle, your garbage will be weighed and you’ll be charged more money. If you recycle the wrong items in the wrong manner you’ll be fined. And now if you do recycle, but too efficiently, you’ll effectively be fined by having to buy a new bin at a vastly overinflated price, because if you don’t the council won’t empty it – and you could then be fined for “littering” if you leave the bin out on the wrong day!
You couldn’t make this stuff up… it’s so unbelievable…
Guest blogged by Autumnflare
Over the last week I’ve been taking a break from World of Warcraft to try out Age of Conan, which is facing the usual question posed to new MMORPGs these days: will it dethrone World of Warcraft from the top spot in MMORPGs?
Quite honestly, I think the answer is no. Like LOTRO it will have its fans, but I can’t see it holding the same level of appeal that WoW has, and once Wrath of the Lich King comes out for WoW other games are going to be in a catch-up situation with the new quest ideas WotLK introduces.
Age of Conan has some spectacular system requirements. The box says that it will run with a 128Mb graphics card under XP or Vista as long as you have plenty of RAM. I’m kind of annoyed it gives the impression that means it’s playable under such a configuration, because it certainly isn’t. On my less than six month old laptop – a dual core 64 bit HP Pavilion DV6500 with 2Gb of RAM but only a 128Mb accelerated graphics card – the best I could manage with all the settings on minimum was 2 frames per second; for a game which requires constant interaction (unlike WoW, Age of Conan requires you to make the attacks yourself) this effectively renders the game unplayable. A real shame because it is a graphic treat. It also fails to mention on the box that if you have Vista you NEED to have Service Pack 1. It nags you if you don’t. I didn’t see any performance increase from installing that, though; apparently AoC dropped support for the supposedly faster DirectX10 and that’s going to be patched in at a later date.
But, being a graphic treat is not without its drawbacks. With a photo-realistic world the temptation is always going to be to want to explore it, and there are places too numerous to mention where your toon simply runs up against an invisible wall, even if an area looks completely open, purely because the game designers don’t want you to go in that direction. It’s possible to climb things, but that’s extremely buggy too, with the interface resorting to having to tell you when there’s something you can climb in the immediate vicinity. Even then, you have to spot it yourself, and sometimes I’ve had it tell me “You can climb here” only to never find what it is I’m supposed to be able to climb. If you do find it, you have to be at the right angle to climb it, or you get an error saying “No line of sight with target”. This is the last thing you need if you’re at the top wanting to climb down, and it’s too easy to fall off a cliff or building trying to align yourself with a ladder or vine.
There are also still a number of problems with places you can get stuck (I found five in the starting village) and the /stuck command does occasionally move you to where you can’t go. I have fallen to my death THROUGH the game world by using the /stuck command, which is a pain since you get a 30 minute stacking debuff that can only be removed by waiting it out or finding where you died – which is impossible to reach if your death was caused by falling through the game world.
The introductory area runs from level 1 to 20, and alternates between class training (said to take place at night, and curiously in single player mode) and normal multiplayer mode. I did find that you could advance very swiftly in night mode, and painfully slowly in day mode. It took me only a few hours to max out each stage of the night-based advancement scenario, but several days to get the experience needed to advance far enough to go advancement questing again.
Guilds are also completely unfinished. You can create a guild the moment you hit 20, on your own, at no cost. This leads to plenty of guilds with only one person in them. Very few have more than five members. Crafting REALLY sucks. You have to be level 20 to start gatherer professions and level 40 to craft things. I managed to work out where to go to find a gatherer trainer (they aren’t in major cities) only to be told to collect 20 leather scraps. Unfortunately, leather scraps are a random drop with a rate of less than 20% so even several days later, I still only have four of the 20 I need, despite spending over three hours grinding mobs to try and get them to drop the leather. The drop rate’s ridiculously low and extremely annoying.
Another thing they really MUST get fixed is that the game world is so graphics intensive that it can often take 10-20 seconds on a slower (I use the term subjectively, since my “slower” desktop is still a 3Ghz AMD 64 bit) machine to load both mobs and NPCs. I often found a golden ? in sitting on the floor marking where my quest NPC was standing, and had to wait for the NPC to load and display. That was just an annoyance; but when it fails to load mobs out in the wilderness it gets downright frustrating. Since the targetting system requires the player to manually swing at mobs using combinations of the 1, 2 and 3 keys, if the mob hasn’t loaded yet you can’t target it. It can target you though, and this can end up with you starting the fight at half health purely because it took that long to load the mob you’re fighting.
These glitches aside, if you have a computer powerful enough to run the game it’s not bad at all – though I do suspect a number of people who would otherwise play it won’t be able to because their machine’s aren’t good enough. The avatar is very customizable in appearance, and as I mentioned earlier the graphics are stunning if you’ve got a good enough card to view them. It’s early days yet; there are still regular bugfix patches… but I don’t know if I’m going to bother paying for gametime when my free 30 days runs out if they don’t fix a few of these major annoyances. Overall it makes the game feel very unfinished, and leaves me wanting to swing a sword at my computer rather than the mobs.
Age of Conan is available now from all major retailers.