I no longer wish to receive tells from anyone under level 10.

[TheSmoo]

In addition, I no longer wish to receive tells from anyone with less than 24 hours of logged-in time.

And I suggest that you take a close look at people who:

Level to 10 and then idle continuously until the 24 hour mark.
Anyone who makes several accounts from the same IP range, and does this on all of them.
Anyone who gets blacklisted by telling a lot of people in a small amount of time. Not just mass-blacklisted, but people who click the name in the tell, and choose "add to blacklist."

[TheSmoo]

This accomplishes two things: it frees me from the constant spam, and it makes it considerably more annoying to tell-spam.

So instead of investing minutes in a character and spamming all the 50s, they have to invest 24 hours. And they have to take time away from farming gil to level characters to 10. And it also provides data: if they want to do this more than once a day, they'll need to do this on multiple accounts at once, which could set off all SORTS of warning flags: idling for 24 hours, running multiple accounts from the same IP range, etc.

And an auto-mute for accounts after they mass-tell everyone and get blacklisted by all of them. That right there would be a good STARTING point.

[TheSmoo]

Oh, and tells from people under level 10 SHOULD be allowed: IF they are on your friends list. For obvious reasons.

[Caraway]

+1'd to all of this.

[TheSmoo]

I usually receive a tell within 30 seconds of logging in or switching to a level 50 job.

[Mimilu]

I like the idea but how will the game tell the difference between a newly built character that's level ten or under versus someone who has been playing the game, leveling an alternate class?

[Amnesia]

The new character has a max class level less than 10.

[TheSmoo]

I like the idea but how will the game tell the difference between a newly built character that's level ten or under versus someone who has been playing the game, leveling an alternate class?

Yeah, just highest-class job.

I'm not trying to not-talk to REAL people, I'm just sick of gil tells. The gil spammers aren't going to stick around long enough for side-job to even be an issue.

Have you ever actually done a search? All those spam tells come from level ONE characters. If they have to put in 5 hours instead of 5 minutes, making those tell-spams becomes an order of magnitude more annoying. And if they then get banned 10 second after they start after the first 5 blacklists (5 different people all select "add to blacklist" from tells), all that time is just out the window.

Then, they have to start over, for what? Another 5 tells? This would make it just completely not an effective use of their time.

And if they have to log 12 or 24 hours, they have to both put in effort to level to 10, plus leave the program running. If they want to attempt tells every hour, and are banned immediately after, they would have to have 12 or 24 accounts going simultaneously, and replace them as they go down. And once you have that many connections, the server SHOULD be able to figure out which IP ranges aren't real player.

[TheSmoo]

Of course, the server should ALREADY be able to figure that out. An IP can be narrowed down to country and region quite easily, and while the specifics will almost never give an EXACT area, it's almost always ballpark. And once a region is identified as as having a lot of these type of connections, it could be subjected to progressively more stringent rules.

So a REAL player, even one living next to a warehouse full of RMT activity could connect, and in a couple days of play have access to full social connections. Perhaps it could even allow tells to other people you are in VISUAL RANGE of. People you run across in towns who you select, and select "send tell", and who do not outright blacklist you? That's normal.

But people who can just log in at level 1, fire up the player search, get a list of 50s and send out 200 tells? That's just lazy. There should have been countermeasures for that at launch.

[Cyrusskorrey]

i agree with the idea of somehow prohibiting tells from new players. i know its harsh but something needs to be done