I expected quite a stir for April, but there's only a few things to announce. Maybe I need to dig a little deeper. What are the readers playing? What are you interested in playing? While I do a lot of research, if you want to hear about a game, I need to know about it. I encourage all of you to drop me an email on what games you're playing. Even if you only play one MMORPG, I want to know.

And so, welcome to April.

Square Enix released Newsletter #18 this morning. They touched on a few changes, another new area in Aht Urhgan, new dark knight spells, and more changes to Besieged. In another move to counter RMT and overcamping, popular NM's are now spawned by trigger items instead of lottery or timed spawns.

Square Enix is happy announce that there is a Windows Vista compatible version of PlayOnline available. However, Tetra Master is still unsupported and there are no plans to support it. Full information and client download are here.

The real meat of the newsletter had to do with the Premiere Site Summit, where sites that specialize in FFXI coverage and earned this status from their community, were invited to attend. After fighting with the problem of a third party windowing program for years, including banning those who admitted using it, Square Enix announced at the Summit that PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XI will receive a patch in the near future to allow for the game to be windowed, officially.

Is it too little too late? With the zealous support of World of Warcraft, and the difficulty of Final Fantasy XI to advance, Square Enix has had to backtrack on issues they held firm in the past. The windowing and NM problems have been issues for years, and just now Square Enix starts to respond. Maybe they will learn from this for their next MMORPG.

This weekend ArchLord will be granting double experience points to all its players, including trial accounts. Now is a perfect time to re-roll a character and get a jump on everyone else. If you aren't currently playing ArchLord, why not get a trial account and get ahead of all your friends? You can sign up and download the client here.

Blizzard had a bit of fun over the weekend with April Fools' Day. First, they introduced the newest item for World of Warcraft: Tinfoil Hat. To obtain the hat, one must first complete the following quest:

The creative masterminds who invented the Tinfoil Hat, special engineers Sculder and Mully, are extremely suspicious of any and all visitors. They use Gnomish Cloaking Devices and their own Tinfoil Hats to stay out of sight, and they will only reveal themselves to connoisseurs of their favorite foods -- Dried Mushroom Rations for Sculder, and Dried Fruit Rations for Mully (these items can be bought in Thrallmar and Honor Hold).

The second announcement was WHoA, a new game based on the World of Warcraft. Sporting four races from WoW, each with their own unit types, players can wage war on each other on Battle.net. The entire page is worth a read. Best of all, unlike a lot of today's MMORPGs, almost any machine out there can enjoy this title, as the system requirements are as low as a Pentium II 400 Mhz. How is that possible? Simple. It's Warcraft III. I had a good laugh, anyway.

• City of Heroes :: Recruit a Sidekick and Get Free Game Time!
• Dungeons & Dragons Online :: The Storm Gathers
• Dungeons & Dragons Online :: Trade or No Trade Is Back!
• Final Fantasy XI :: New Player Guide
• Final Fantasy XI :: Egg Hunt Egg-stravagana!
• Guild Wars :: The Scribe: Rabbit Tales & Storage News [Issue #38]
• Guild Wars :: The Future of Competitive Guild Wars is Here
• Lord of the Rings Online :: Beta Journal: Monster Play
• MU Online :: Battle Soccer League has Arrived
• Vanguard - Saga of Heroes :: Top 10 Bugs (In the Works)

Overall, a fairly quiet week in the MMORPG realms. Most companies must've been too busy with their own events to make a lot of news. Let's look ahead to next week being more exciting.

See you then,
Mikel Tidwell