As far as I know there's no reason why a new player *needs* to request a friendship. If two players want to be friends then the "older" player can make the request. It's unbelievably easy to get to lvl5 in any class, it's almost handed to you when you begin the storyline, so they could make it so that you can't request friendship until then.
In short - players should have to complete a quest to enable friendship requests at circa lvl5.
I'm wondering what they'll do next...
Linkshell invites? At least you can fill your 8 up and not be bothered with it.
Free Company invites? Can also be skipped by being in one.
Using Party Finder for it?
Going into Duty Finder and advertising there too?
This is why we can't have nice things.
I know this doesn't sort party invites, but I'd like them to introduce 30 min afk = kicked to title screen, on trial accounts.
Tired of seeing them there for hours, with no action taken against accounts reported hours ago.
That won't do anything, unfortunately. You can manually set AFK on and continue to do stuff while "AFK" - and that's exactly what they appear to do.