New person with several questions

[Risvertasashi]

Typically getting max level happens in a week or weeks, depending on how much play time you have. For it to take a month or longer, you would have to have very little time to play and/or not be working much towards leveling at all (which is fine if you're having fun).

Get 1 class to 50 first (Barring job unlock prereqs and unless there's a crossclass skill you really want). You get an experience bonus if you're leveling a class that's a lower level than your highest. So if you get 1 class to 50, all your other classes get a 50% exp bonus up to level 48 or so. This is particularly helpful after you've used up the main story quest as a source of exp.

Welcome and good luck out there!

[Drazin]

Thanks for the prompt responses, two more questions

1. I noticed I was getting a crap load of gold/gill site spam for the hour or so I played, is this a constant problem and can you do more then just blacklist people who do this?

2. How is the player economy as I am still on the initial trial I am locked from the market board (what i presume to be the player market). Once I do get in to it will I find that I will need thousands and thousands of gill for basic purchases or millions for semi good items?

[Risvertasashi]

Thanks for the prompt responses, two more questions

1. I noticed I was getting a crap load of gold/gill site spam for the hour or so I played, is this a constant problem and can you do more then just blacklist people who do this?

2. How is the player economy as I am still on the initial trial I am locked from the market board (what i presume to be the player market). Once I do get in to it will I find that I will need thousands and thousands of gill for basic purchases or millions for semi good items?

1. RMT spam is one of the bigger issues the community is dealing with right now. As others have said, /busy works as a stopgap but it comes with a lot of downsides. Another thing you can do is try to come to a very populated server like Balmung, which has far less spam by virtue of it being so hard to get a character on it.
Unfortunately there's not a whole lot you can do. You can also go into your chat settings and remove the chime from it, but, well... Yeah.

2. The best gear in the game at all levels are drops or (at endgame) earned from tokens from doing content. You don't really need gil at all. That said, a small amount does help to fill in the slots you don't get drops for... shouldn't be too difficult to afford whites, and a supportive FC may have crafters that will give you pieces for free.

Good luck out there.

[Niwashi]

1. I noticed I was getting a crap load of gold/gill site spam for the hour or so I played, is this a constant problem and can you do more then just blacklist people who do this?

Unfortunately, yes, this is a constant problem.

As you've found, you can blacklist them. This helps with the ones spamming the /shout channel in cities, as they tend to keep spamming their message over and over and over for quite a while. It's less useful for the ones sending /tell messages to you directly, as most of them tend to send a couple messages to everyone on the server and then switch to a different character so they can repeat the process. (The blacklist is, unfortunately, set to blacklisting the specific character and not all characters on their account, so switching characters is all they need to do to get around it.)

You can also report them to SE. Gil selling and the spam advertising it are against the ToS, and SE will eventually get around to banning their accounts. The reporting feature is really cumbersome, though, requiring you to fill out an entire form describing the issue rather than pulling all that info from the game itself, so most people don't bother.

You can use the command "/busy" to set your online status to a mode where nobody can send you tells, trade with you, invite you to a Party, FC, or Linkshell, or send you a Friend Invite. Obviously, that cuts you off from a lot of contact with other players, but it's an option for when the spam gets frustrating enough you'd rather isolate yourself than deal with it.

(As it currently stands, none of these are really good solutions, and a lot of us are getting pretty frustrated with SE's unwillingness to implement anything better. You can see that frustration in a number of threads over in the General Discussion forum.)

2. How is the player economy as I am still on the initial trial I am locked from the market board (what i presume to be the player market). Once I do get in to it will I find that I will need thousands and thousands of gill for basic purchases or millions for semi good items?

That's rather hard to answer, as the economy varies between different servers. From what I understand, the older more highly populated servers generally tend to have a lot more inflation than newer lower population servers, though I don't know whether that's true in every case.

How dependent you are on the economy also depends quite a bit on your playstyle. Nobody is selling anything you couldn't get or make for yourself if you're willing to put the time into it, so if you decide things are just way too expensive you can go the self-reliant route. You can get into crafting and make your gear rather than buying crafted gear, gather your own materials for it rather than buying them, spiritbond materia rather than buying it, and so on. Of course, not many people have the patience to (or interest in) doing that for everything. You'll need to find your own balance point between how much stuff to earn/make/farm on your own and how much stuff to just buy.

If prices on your server are inflated, and there are at least some categories of stuff you want to buy from the Market Board rather than get yourself, then you just need to find other things you can farm, gather or make to sell on the Market Board. An inflated economy on the stuff you want to buy is likely to be balanced by a similarly inflated economy on the stuff you sell, so you should be able to make the gil you need that way. (If prices on your server aren't overly inflated, this may not even be necessary, as the normal returns you get directly from quests/FATEs/dungeons, etc will cover a lot of expenses.)